Keywording limitations

[BobT]

Lightroom Version

12.1

Operating System

1. Windows 11

I have a catalogue of about 11,000 images. I use nested keywording extensively, for example, for people, I might have then located by Place>Country>State>Town>Street>Number, named under People>Family>Surname>First name, then by Event>Birthday party etc. I've recently noticed that some low level keywords have popped out to the top level. What causes this? Am I reaching the limits of keywording? Do I need to clean things up? If so, how?
Edit: These errant keywords that are popping out to the top, seem to be the Synonyms put into the keywording dialogue box. Still checking. It might be a bug.

 

[Califdan]

You have not reached a limit. I have well over30,000 keywords and no indication of hitting any limits. A couple of things can cause a keyword to show up at the highest level of the KW hierarchy.

The most common is that you have imported an image containing that KW that was not saved as a LrC hierarchy and a new keyword was added at the top level. If you still have the original keyword nested in your structure that is most likely what happened.

Another possibility is if you initially imported or shot images using one of the LR cloud based apps and added some KW's there before it was able to sync down to LrC. In general, keywords don't sync between LR and LrC but the way they implemented it has left several holes (bugs?) where keywords can get synced (at least one time). So, it may be that keywords you entered in the LR/Cloud found their way to LR/Classic through one of these holes. As LR/Cloud does not support hierarchical keywords, if this happened those KW's would be added to the top level. See https://www.danhartfordphoto.com/blog/2019/8/LR12-Sync-LR-Classic-Keywords-to-LR-Cloud for more info on this.

 

[BobT]

You have not reached a limit. I have well over30,000 keywords and no indication of hitting any limits. A couple of things can cause a keyword to show up at the highest level of the KW hierarchy.

The most common is that you have imported an image containing that KW that was not saved as a LrC hierarchy and a new keyword was added at the top level. If you still have the original keyword nested in your structure that is most likely what happened.

Another possibility is if you initially imported or shot images using one of the LR cloud based apps and added some KW's there before it was able to sync down to LrC. In general, keywords don't sync between LR and LrC but the way they implemented it has left several holes (bugs?) where keywords can get synced (at least one time). So, it may be that keywords you entered in the LR/Cloud found their way to LR/Classic through one of these holes. As LR/Cloud does not support hierarchical keywords, if this happened those KW's would be added to the top level. See https://www.danhartfordphoto.com/blog/2019/8/LR12-Sync-LR-Classic-Keywords-to-LR-Cloud for more info on this.

Good to know I haven't reached a limit.
Yes, I occasionally move images to another app then back again. That could be upsetting the apple cart. I'll follow that up.
I have LrC synced to a degree with LR on a laptop and on a phone but use them for presentation only. Frankly, I don't like the cloudy apps... to put it mildly.