Keyword questions

[sbrand]

Hi,
I have 2 problems with keywording that I'd like to unravel.

The first is a hierarchy problem:

My keyword list LOOKS LIKE but isn't a hierarchy.

If I click on a keyword Pasha (for example), it appears below a top level keyword ANIMALS [133' images]. Nested below it I have a keyword Cats [25 images]. Nested in Cats is the keyword Pasha [7 images]. If I am in grid mode and click on the keyword Pasha, all 7 images pop up, but the box containing Keyword Tags only has the keyword Pasha. It does not have Cats or ANIMALS.

If I click on Cats the ANIMALS tags shows only 1322 images, Cats shows 17 images and the images of Pasha don't show up at all.

Worse still, if I click on ANIMALS, the image number shows 1321; the next level shows Cats as 16; Pasha has a downward arrow [no images]; there is a keyword nested below Pasha that says Cats and nested below that is a grayed out tag for ANIMALS with a + sign next to it and ' images. A true mess.

It all looks nice and neat in the Keyword List when all the arrows are compacted, but nothing works....

I'm not quite sure how all this happened but I'd love a good strategy to straighten it out as easily as possible.

Second problem is sort of the first in reverse. Some images have somehow ended up with between one and 15 keywords that have absolutely nothing to do with the images and I need to find the best way to go through 11,'''+ images and correct the ones that have the problem. For example (and this is probably an easy one), I have a group of images of NYC Harbors. Weirdly, most of these seem to have the dog's name, Danke, attached to them as well, and they are tagged only Danke, Harbors, NYC Harbors. Of over 4'' NYC Harbor images, 99 are tagged Danke. How do I remove the tag from all at the same time?

These 4''+ NYC Harbor pics should all be nested as follows:
PLACES>North America>USA>New York>NYC>Manhattan>NYC Harbors
While many of them have those keywords and my keyword list shows that nesting classification, what shows up in my box of Keyword Tags is a messy alphabetical list of those words and more....No nesting shows up....

I read lots about creating keyword systems; obviously did lots wrong anyway.
Can't find much of anything about how to fix a messed up non-system.

All help is appreciated

Thanks
Stephanie

 

[schussman]

The description of the first problem makes it sound like (possibly) you have two instances of the keyword "Pasha," one of which sits in the Animals hierarchy, and one of which does not. If you look outside of that hierarchy, do you have a second "Pasha" kw? The best way to check this is to use the filter in the keyword list to show Pasha; if there are two, you'll see them both show up. You can select all the images with the non-hierarchical keyword, then apply the hierarchical kw to them; and finally you can un-check the non-hierarchical keyword to remove it from all the selected photos. Does that get you any traction, or have I misinterpreted the problem?

The second problem sounds more straightforward to resolve: You want to select the "enter keywords" mode of the keyword box. Then select the whole set of images with the NYC Harbors tag, and you'll see that the keyword box will show "Danke*" -- the asterisk means that the keyword isn't applied to every selected image. Since you're in "enter keywords" mode, you can just bring focus to the keyword box, then select and delete the Danke* keyword. That should remove it from all the images in the selected set that it's assigned to.

The keyword box itself doesn't show hierarchical relationships. The way I understand it is that while keywords themselves are hierarchical in their organization within Lightroom (i.e. in addition to synonyms, they can have parents and children), keywords as they are applied to images do not; that is, when you assign a hierarchical keyword to an image, in practice what you're doing is assigning each keyword _in_ that hierarchy to the image. Pros, is that off-base?

I hope this is a little helpful.

 

[Kiwigeoff]

Don't forget to be in Library/Grid/Select all to delete the keywords.