Keywording strategy... the five W's

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Anyone care to comment on my strategy on keywording in Lightroom?

So far I've only added keywords for peoples names, and country/city/location, but I intend to get better at tagging the actual content also. After much thinking I've come to like the idea of "the five W's". That's a term used in photo-journalism in order to remember five important aspects of a picture - who, what, where, when, why:

Who is in the picture? This I'm already doing with hierarcial keywords.

What is in the picture? This I intend to do with keywords - the most important objects in the picture, e.g. beach, water, boat, sky, food, people... (can usually be described with a noun).

Where was the picture taken? This I'm already doing with country/city/location and GPS-tagging.

When was the picture taken? This is handled automatically by EXIF, as long as you have the correct time set in camera.

Why was the picture taken? What is happening, what is the moment about? This I intend to do with keywords - eating, dancing, sunbathing, mountainhiking... (can usually be described with a verb)

These five categories I see as five top-levels in the keywording hierarchy. That makes it ease to see wether a picture have been tagged or not for a specific kategory, which in turn makes it easy to create smart collections for example for all pictures not tagged for "why".
Within each category there will be a lot of appropriate keywords, but also special cases such as "nobody" in order to be able to tag a picture without people. As opposed to simply not tagging it, because then it will turn up in searches for untagged pictures, even thoug I have already noticed that there are no poeople in it.

The one can always ad more categories... type, mood, colors, season... but one has to draw the line somewhere.
 
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Hi,

I subscribe to a very differing system, one that places a clear and concise distinction between when to keywords and when to use a collection.

I use keywords to describe the contents of a photo using keywords that would be understood by an unrelated third party. So, in this context, "black", "cat", "mat" would be valid keywords for a photos of a block cat on a mat. Adding "Felix" wouldn't be valid because no one else knows who Felix is.

The advantage of this strategy is that the keywords will be appropriate when the image passes out of your hands. For example, if you decide to put the photo on a stock site. Also, you don't have to worry about whether to use a collection or a key word - it's clear.

I use collections for everything else. Friends, family and pets, for example, are organised into a hierarchical set. So are images for my site, or for a particular client.

Tim
 
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I'm pretty well in line with Tim's 3rd party here, except it's either a blind man or someone on the other end of the phone. So phase 1 is describing the pictures' contents in a very mundane way. Next is "abstract" - what is the image about such as "joy", "democracy", "green". Only after thinking about those do I go on to the "known", what I know about the image such as where it was taken. Names only get in if they're widely known.

As for keywords/collections split, keywords are external and meaningful to others, collections are internal and perhaps only mean anything to me and my workflow.

John
 
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Building on that public/private thing, I'll mention again a problem I recently discovered when modifying someone's export plug-in. I discovered that it was written for LR's initial SDK 1.3 which exported all the keywords applied to an image, and hadn't been updated to 2.2 which offers a "will export keywords" option. So it was happily exporting keywords marked as "do not export". If you put stuff in keywords that really doesn't belong there, sooner or later it will find a way to get out....

John
 
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I see you guys are thinking more in the lines of a commercial photographer (which you are?) whereas I am "only" an amateur photographer doing this for fun and for my own sake.

Keywording peoples names, events and places is crucial to me... I need to be able to quickly answer my wifes question "do we have any good photos of my parents?". Or "wouldn't it be nice to see photos from all the different hotel rooms we've had?". Or "what year did we build that fence around the swimming-pool, can we have a quick look at all our pool-pictures?". Or combinations: "Do we have any photos of your parents having dinner at my parents house around christmas time?"

The reasons I seem to like to have everything as keywords are:
- Basing smart collections on keywords (or lack of keywords) makes the collections auto-learning. I don't have to keep adding pictures to different collections, I just have to remember to keyword them properly. And the ones I haven't keyworded will show up in the "non-keyworded collection".
- Keywords also makes it easier to set up similar smart collections on other computers
- Saving keywords to files (JPG and DNG) makes everything accessible from other applications, and also acts as a backup in case LR (and it's backups) crashes/disapears

3'd party issues, or "images passing out of my hands" is not really a situation for me. "Real" photographers might see this differently though I assume.
 
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Erro,
I'm coming from the same perspective as you, and have been frustrated that there is little if anything out there that addresses issues specific to say, a family historian like myself :eek:

Although I don't do it myself, I like the idea of the 5 W's and will give that some thought. I can see myself keywording under general headings, "Why, Who", etc, and then being able to search for photos that DON"T have "Why" in keywords... that sounds really neat to me, and if I took that too the extreme, I could make searches for all of my MISSING information, like photos that need to be given locations, which gives me the opportunity to go back at my leisurely moments and keyword those photos more thoroughly. I've been handling this by keeping my photos on my internal hard drive "Working" folder until they are rated and keyworded, but it leaves me wondering "if this photos has ANY keywords, it doesn't make it complete... it just means that I keyworded with ONE significant category.. like I put everyone's names, but I didn't include the location the pic was taken at.... Just some real food for thought.....

Dawn
 
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Hm, I always think of "serious photographers", which includes you, and don't really draw a distinction between amateur and professional. You're right to see smart collections as you do, and having a methodology (regardless whether it's your 5 W's or my 3 phase approach) also means you get as many keywords in as possible in the time you consider it's worth devoting to the task.

If you are sure pictures can't get out of your system, OK. Are you sure? And after all, your reasons are essentially about keywords' portability.

John
 
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[quote author=Tim Armes link=topic=7317.msg49839#msg49839 date=1248377193]
Hi,

I subscribe to a very differing system, one that places a clear and concise distinction between when to keywords and when to use a collection.

I use keywords to describe the contents of a photo using keywords that would be understood by an unrelated third party. So, in this context, "black", "cat", "mat" would be valid keywords for a photos of a block cat on a mat. Adding "Felix" wouldn't be valid because no one else knows who Felix is.

The advantage of this strategy is that the keywords will be appropriate when the image passes out of your hands. For example, if you decide to put the photo on a stock site. Also, you don't have to worry about whether to use a collection or a key word - it's clear.

I use collections for everything else. Friends, family and pets, for example, are organised into a hierarchical set. So are images for my site, or for a particular client.

Tim
[/quote]

This concern over third parties is one that I have never heard, and one that leaves me somewhat cold. I don't worry about some third party being confused/outraged/annoyed/what? over seeing Felix as a tag. I can't even imagine it bothering or affecting a third party.

What I do see this approach doing is limiting the functionality of Lightroom, with no particular advantage to me.

Limiting the functionality? Yeah ... you can search for photos with keywords "Felix" and "Claire", but you can't search for photos that are in two collections.

I see no advantage to this approach.
 
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[quote author=dj_paige link=topic=7317.msg49857#msg49857 date=1248386489]

This concern over third parties is one that I have never heard, and one that leaves me somewhat cold. I don't worry about some third party being confused/outraged/annoyed/what? over seeing Felix as a tag. I can't even imagine it bothering or affecting a third party.

What I do see this approach doing is limiting the functionality of Lightroom, with no particular advantage to me.

Limiting the functionality? Yeah ... you can search for photos with keywords "Felix" and "Claire", but you can't search for photos that are in two collections.

I see no advantage to this approach.
[/quote]In what way can't you search photos in two Collections? You Cmd/Ctrl select two or more Collections and you to filter for Text, Attribute or Metadata...

Works for me in 2.4!

Don
 
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[quote author=erro link=topic=7317.msg49888#msg49888 date=12484'979']
If worrying about 3'rd party seeing keywords, one simply choose what keywords will export or not... yes?
[/quote]
Yes, but read my post about the plug-in.

[quote author=dj_paige link=topic=7317.msg49857#msg49857 date=1248386489]
This concern over third parties is one that I have never heard, and one that leaves me somewhat cold. I don't worry about some third party being confused/outraged/annoyed/what? over seeing Felix as a tag. I can't even imagine it bothering or affecting a third party.
What I do see this approach doing is limiting the functionality of Lightroom, with no particular advantage to me.
Limiting the functionality? Yeah ... you can search for photos with keywords "Felix" and "Claire", but you can't search for photos that are in two collections.
[/quote]
Oh yes you can. Smart collections can target the dumb collection name.

Paige, the original mention of third parties was in terms of how you come up with keywords. The idea is that you force yourself to think how you'd describe the pictures to a complete stranger (blind man or someone down the phone). It's a way to get yourself out of the comfort zone.

Now, the concern about third parties. I'll give you some examples - there are plenty. Some people put stock agency information into keywords, and tick do not export (there are some LR trainers who encourage this). I gave one example of how unreliable it was, and think about the sort of bug (and the fix) that happened with the Lr2.' upgrade, so would you really want Getty to see your Alamy details? Or take family shots. I might put on Flickr a picture of my little niece carefully captioned "little girl in snow" and with only her first name as a keyword, so no-ine would know who the girl was or be able to search for pictures of her. Trouble is, we share a surname, so if my Flickr account includes it....

John
 
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So my approach of just using the keyword "stuff" for all my images isn't going to cut it then? :icon_lol:
I like the idea of viewing collections as personal and keywords as external. My question is how are you getting your images into the collections, or multiple collections? It seems you have to get your categories pre-defined all up front and then remember to place every image you import into the correct categories as opposed to being able to think of a category later and retrospectively apply a keyword filter to populate it. Or am I missing a trick here (entirely likely tbh)
 
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[quote author=johnbeardy link=topic=7317.msg49894#msg49894 date=1248418754]

Paige, the original mention of third parties was in terms of how you come up with keywords. The idea is that you force yourself to think how you'd describe the pictures to a complete stranger (blind man or someone down the phone). It's a way to get yourself out of the comfort zone.
[/quote]

Again ... advice that works for some people, and not for others. I absolutely don't care about how third parties will view my keywords. The keywords are there for my benefit, not for some unknown third party.

If you want to keyword for the benefit of a third party, that's fine, especially if you do share your photos with total strangers. I usually don't share my photos in that manner and so I have no interest in changing the way I do keywords for the benefit of total strangers.

I'm sure there are others reading this, who like me, use keywords for their own benefit and not for the benefit of third parties, and reading this thread, they may think they need to re-do their keywords. I want people to see there are multiple options.
 
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No. In 6 months or a year or two, or whenever, you start being very similar to that third party, not quite remembering exactly what keywords you used for a certain picture. Putting yourself in someone else's shoes, you force yourself out of your comfort zone and quickly add the sort of extra words that you may also search for.

You are the only one saying people need to re-do their keywords. And it's not a case of one option instead of another, just doing things a bit more systematically and better.

John
 
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Moderator Intervention:

I sense a potential decay in decorum here; let's all remind ourselves of our goal here: "discussion of Adobe's Lightroom in a friendly and positive atmosphere that all can enjoy."
 
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[quote author=johnbeardy link=topic=7317.msg49894#msg49894 date=1248418754]
Or take family shots. I might put on Flickr a picture of my little niece carefully captioned "little girl in snow" and with only her first name as a keyword, so no-ine would know who the girl was or be able to search for pictures of her. Trouble is, we share a surname, so if my Flickr account includes it....

John
[/quote]

Excellent point, John. Its easy to overlook this when posting images in a public place, although I tend not to post my images publically for this reason.

--Ken
 
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[quote author=dj_paige link=topic=7317.msg49911#msg49911 date=124844'324]
Again ... advice that works for some people, and not for others. I absolutely don't care about how third parties will view my keywords. The keywords are there for my benefit, not for some unknown third party.
[/quote]

Yes, that's fair enough, and no one was suggesting that the personal/private distinction would work for everyone. I bought it up to explain how I use keywords personally, and therefore offered it as a possible solution for other people to follow if they wish. Even if images aren't being supplied to third parties, it has the advantage of providing a clear distinction for using keywords vs. collections, and this sort of thing helps when trying to stick to a clean workflow or when searching for images.

Other techniques may work for other people, and it's good to hear about them and for the users to express the advantages. What's not so useful is to condemn or belittle a system that's clearly working well for other photographers just because it wouldn't work well in your case. Lightroom offers itself to many workflows and many types of photographer - that's why it's so popular.

Tim
 
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To moderator: this thread was never about offending anyone, or arguing for arguings sake, just to share my ideas and see what others think about them.

To all you others, especially you guys using static collections: someone asked this earlier... how do you keep track of which images you have already gone through and added to a collection, or not added, and how are they different from images you haven't yet gone through?

A simple scenario:
Let's assume my library has photos of four different people: Amy, Fred, John and Sue. Amy and Fred are married and are both my friends, John is another friend of mine, and Sue is a friend of Amy's and I don't really know her.

Let's make two smart collections:
"Friends" which contains images with keywords Amy OR Fred OR John
"Family Smith" which contains images with keywords Amy OR Fred
Two auto-learning collections that will update themselves whenever I add keywords to new or existing photos.

Let's say that Amy and Fred get divorced tomorrow. Then I'll update the smart collection settings to be: (keywords Amy OR Fred) AND date is before july 25 2''9. When Amy later on hooks up with John and finally marries him on new years eve I make a new smart collection for "Family Johnson" with (keywords Amy OR John) AND date is after december 31 2''9. As you see, Amy can belong to different families at different times, but she is always Amy.

And when I finally consider Sue to be a friend of mine, I'll just add her name to the "Friends" collection, and automatically all of her photos appear there, without me having to go through them all over and add them to a static collection.

One of the keys of using keywords (!) as I see it is that you can easily create these smart collections. That makes it easy to see if you have any non-keyworded images for a specific category, for examples peoples names. Just searching for images without keywords may not help, since they might have other keywords, but are missing peoples names. Using a top category of "who" allows you to search for photos without the keyword "who". You can even make a smart collection for it, and then you can easily go through all your no-names photos whenever you feel like. As opposed to having a static collection for Amy... how would you know if you had even considered a photo for the Amy-collection? All photos in the Amy-collection are obviously of Amy, but what about all other? How can you tell if that's a photo you've already looked at and said "no Amy here" or if it's a photo you haven't evaluated yet?
 
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It's going to cause a lot of problems if Amy marries John. Their social circles will probably clash with Fred's, and so their mutual friends will have to choose between them, and make all sorts of excuses not to go to some dinners and parties. And are you sure Sue is really your friend, or is she just taking advantage of your generosity?

On a serious note, do you have any quick techniques for tagging all those people? Do you type names for each individual photo. Or do you highlight all the photos with certain people in them, and keyword groups of them at one time? Any other methods?



Regarding tagging, I do see the point that names shouldn't be exported to stock databases, but the argument that photos in lightroom shouldn't be tagged with names is not a persuasive one because of the hierarchical keywording and keyword export settings.

I do wonder why would you send photos of your family and friends for stock anyway? Surely you can't just decide one day to upload and sell photos of your family and friends? Wouldn't you need to get a model release form signed for each photo?
 
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The solution to questionable friends is not to have any at all... :-)

I am not uploading any of my photos to stock agencies. I'm keywording for my own sake, so I can sort pictures the way I want to. As I said earlier: commercial photographers might have another view.

When I tag images for people I just select one image and mark the name for each of the persons in it. Done. Now this image has the "who" tag and therefore I'm done with it with regards to names. It's not like there will pop up any new persons in this image (nor will any disapear from it). However, this image may still lack keywords for the "what" category, so it will show up in a smart collection for "doesn't contain 'what'".

The only time this method doesn't work is if don't keyword all people in an image at once, so I don't make that mistake. But note that it only applies to one individual image. I can easily sort out all images that I still have to go through with respect to people.

I'm still curious how the "static collection" guys do this. Do you have a 1''% strict discipline to allways put all your images inte the proper collections straight away at import? If not, how do you keep track and distinguish between:
- images that already have been considered for a collection but deemed to be not included
- images you yet haven't considered for that collection
Both these types of images will just simply not be in the collection.
 
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Perhaps I should ad that I'm using peoples names as an example, but it applies equally well to any other keyword or category you might want to tag images for...
 
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> I am not uploading any of my photos to stock agencies. I'm keywording for my own sake

I know *you* aren't, but one of the main arguments made against keywording people's names appeared to be 'what if in the future you decide to send your collection for stock?'.

Apart from the fact that all names (and any other personal tags) could be kept under the parent term, which could be set not to export, I was making a point that there are far greater barriers to suddenly deciding that you want your collection to be used commercially, such as gaining written permission from all the people in your photos.

> When I tag images for people I just select one image and mark the
> name for each of the persons in it.

That sounds like too much work for me.
I'll wait for the 'people recognition' plugin to be released.
 
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It was very interesting to read this thread. We are all different individuals with different backgrounds brought up with different ideas. What works for me - will not work for you therefore I will not tell you my strategy. You should do whatever you feel right is which is the perfect game plan for yourself.

Bob- the slide shooter at heart
 
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[quote author=Anti link=topic=7317.msg49989#msg49989 date=1248525265]
> I am not uploading any of my photos to stock agencies. I'm keywording for my own sake
I know *you* aren't, but one of the main arguments made against keywording people's names appeared to be 'what if in the future you decide to send your collection for stock?'.[/quote]
Not really, no-one mentioned stock in particular, but it is more a general observation that keywords will sooner or later find their way out into the big wide world. Even in LR, you can mark them as not to export, but I mentioned two ways in which that has happened.
 
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