Keyword Showing Up Everywhere

[Patrick Bennett]

Lightroom Version Number

Classic CC 8.0

Operating System

1. macOS 10.14 Mojave

Hi All,
I have a keyword: "Vertical" that somehow has attached itself to dozen's or hundred's of other keywords. Example:

All of the ones that are containing keywords disappear in the Will Export pane except for one:

Odd part with that is that I've searched for "Vertical" in the keyword list and then deleted the only "Vertical" keyword that showed up. So, according to my Keyword List the keyword "Vertical" does not exist yet there it is in both the Will Export and Enter Keywords panes.

This shows no results when searching for the keyword "Vertical" in the Keyword List:

I'm hoping someone can steer me in the direction of deleting every single instance of the word Vertical from my list including, of course, all of those that seem to be invisible.

Thanks for any clues.
Patrick

 

[tspear]

look for synonyms.

 

[Philippe Coudé du Foresto]

I had a similar corruption in my catalog once. This "ghost" keyword was a corruption of the table AgLibraryKeyword. This first record of the table is the root of the keyword hierarchy and its fields "lc_name" and "name" are empty which make it invisible.
In my case, for some unknown reason, these fields contained a word, which was then visible when displaying the keyword list of an image (although I didn't enter it). But since this record is root of the global keyword list, it it not shown nor search for when querying the global list. This led, as for you, to a keyword automatically added to the image keyword list, but not exported with the image nor visible/searchable in th global keyword list.
I fixed the problem by manually empty the fields 'lc_name" and "name" of the first record of the "AgLibraryKeyword" table with a sqlite tool.

 

[Patrick Bennett]

look for synonyms.

The only way I see to do that is to Edit Keyword and check if the synonym exists within that keyword. I've looked in a handful of these and found no "Vertical" synonym. Is there a different way to search for synonyms?

 

[tspear]

The only way I see to do that is to Edit Keyword and check if the synonym exists within that keyword. I've looked in a handful of these and found no "Vertical" synonym. Is there a different way to search for synonyms?

That is the only way I know. But check Philleppe's reply also.

Tim

 

[Jim Wilde]

A Smart Collection (Keywords>Contains>Vertical) should find all images that have the keyword Vertical, either as a keyword or a synonym. But after that, it's a case of finding which of the identified keyword(s) have that synonym (and it looks from your first screenshot that there are at least 3 keywords that have it).....all I can suggest there is setup the smart collection, then when it's populated click on it to fill the grid with all the images that you now know have Vertical somewhere, open the library filter, select keywords in the first column. Then it's a case of editing each of the keywords in the filtered list to find the culprits.

In theory, each time you find a synonym and delete it, that should reduce the number of images in the smart collection accordingly.....but that particular aspect looks a big buggy in that when I tested this the smart collection wasn't immediately updated. A Lightroom restart would trigger the update, but that might become a bit of a pain if you have loads of keywords with that synonym.

 

[Rob_Cullen]

Has anyone suggested Exporting the Keyword list and searching the text file for synonyms, enclosed in curly brackets{..} ? And would this find the aberrant "Vertical" to then fix in Lightroom?

 

[LouieSherwin]

You could also take a look at the AnyTag plugin. It will search both keyword terms and aliases and return all keywords that contain the search term.

-louie

 

[Patrick Bennett]

A Smart Collection (Keywords>Contains>Vertical) should find all images that have the keyword Vertical, either as a keyword or a synonym. But after that, it's a case of finding which of the identified keyword(s) have that synonym (and it looks from your first screenshot that there are at least 3 keywords that have it).....all I can suggest there is setup the smart collection, then when it's populated click on it to fill the grid with all the images that you now know have Vertical somewhere, open the library filter, select keywords in the first column. Then it's a case of editing each of the keywords in the filtered list to find the culprits.

In theory, each time you find a synonym and delete it, that should reduce the number of images in the smart collection accordingly.....but that particular aspect looks a big buggy in that when I tested this the smart collection wasn't immediately updated. A Lightroom restart would trigger the update, but that might become a bit of a pain if you have loads of keywords with that synonym.

Thanks for the response Jim.
The plot thickens. I created the smart collection with the keyword: Vertical. That contains 105k of 112k total catalogue images. This screenshot shows the keyword in the image but also shows that the keyword does NOT exist in the keyword list:

.

In response to I-See-Light I did export the keyword list, alas Vertical does not exist there either.

I tried using the paint keywords/option to delete Vertical but it did not delete it. These screenshots shows the three ways of viewing keywords: Enter Keywords, Keywords and Containing Keywords and Will Export:

So, the only way I could delete the keyword is in the Enter Keywords window but I can't do that because it doesn't exist there. It does, however, exist in the windows that I can't alter.

A very short time ago I don't believe that this keyword had infected 105k images, I don't recall adding that keyword to them for sure. Somehow it got added to most of my images, ghost in the machine. I'm looking at backups to see if I've got a recent copy without this problem.

Thanks to everyone for your suggestions.

 

[Patrick Bennett]

This is much worse than I could imagine. My backup from 5 days ago has this attached to just one image:

Vertical has infected nearly every keyword, it's like a worm or something. In this catalogue I created the smart collection "Vertical" and 112,518 of 112,616 has this keyword in it. I tried selecting a keyword and editing it to uncheck synonym (even though there were no synonyms in it to begin with) and to not export it but that didn't change anything.

I think I'm screwed, none of this has any logic to it.

 

[tspear]

Again. Look at post #3.
Tim

Sent from my SM-J737T using Tapatalk

 

[Patrick Bennett]

Again. Look at post #3.
Tim

Sent from my SM-J737T using Tapatalk

I'm a bit intimidated by the sqLite tool but will give it a shot. Thanks for prodding.

 

[LouieSherwin]

I'm a bit intimidated by the sqLite tool but will give it a shot. Thanks for prodding.

You might want to consider asking @Victoria Bampton to send your catalog file to her pocket expert that can often work magic on corrupted catalogs. A also if this a catalog problem I think that Adobe would be interested in looking at your file to see if they can prevent it from happening again.

-louie

 

[Patrick Bennett]

Philippe took my catalogue, fixed it, sent it back and so far it seems to be fixed. This restores my faith in humanity AND computers! Louie, I will contact both Victoria and Adobe to see it they want to look into the cause of this issue.

Thanks to all for contributing to this, I really thought I was screwed as my recent backups all had the same issue.

 

[Philippe Coudé du Foresto]

I confirm that the corruption in Patrick's catalog was exactly the same than the one I had some time ago and described in post #3.
It's difficult to know when this corruption did occur, because the symptoms are not obvoius and clearly visible and therefore noticed a long time after the corruption.

 

[Patrick Bennett]

This issue that was repaired by Phillipe a couple of months ago has reared it's ugly head again, with a different keyword attaching itself to many other keywords but does not show up in the keyword list. Rather than ask again I gave the SQLite a try and Phillipe's instructions work perfectly. Thank you very much, Phillipe. One exception is that now a comma " , " appears in the "export keywords" but does not exist in the list nor does it show up in the SQlite tool. Almost there, I'm restarting and searching for the comma in the SQlite tool again shortly.

I would love for Adobe to look at this issue, how do I get it to them?

Thanks, this forum is extremely helpful.

 

[Patrick Bennett]

After a lot of experimentation I was able to remove the comma from the keyword list. I first deleted the bad keyword at the top level in SQlite and that made the comma appear in the "Will Export" window of every image that had keywords. Back in SQlite I added a comma, that put two commas as the first keyword. The comma I put in SQlite now appears at the top level in the keyword list so I edited that keyword and unchecked the Keyword Tag Options in the edit keyword dialogue box. Now nothing appears before the keywords but KEYWORD is now the top level of the keyword hierarchy. I'd rather not have it in the keywords but this is much better than that comma in front of every images keywords.

I'd still love to get my LRcat that was the problem to Adobe so they can have a crack at it.

 

[tspear]

@Victoria Bampton can your connections at Adobe help?

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Hey Tim & Patrick, sorry, I missed this thread. Yeah, happy to pass it on to Adobe.