Keywords from parent folder name

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LordOfSchnitzel

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Hi all,

Ive just bought lightroom 2.1 to organize my photo library. I manage my photos in a series of folders in the file system.
The convention I use is year/month/_datestamp_+_event-descriptive-name_
I have added this as a folder in LR2. My event descriptive name is sufficient enough to be used for keywords.

Is there a way I can get LR to use a file's parent folder's name and extract keywords from it? I know that Extensis Portfolio can do this, but it doesnt of course offer all the editing features as LR.

Thoughts, ideas?

Thanks

Toby
 
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Keep talking to me about LR/Transporter Mark...

Also, just to clarify, my images themselves contain no keywords, its just the folder name which encloses them which has the descriptive name (i.e. keywords).

I want to avoid anything which causes my files to be written to (e.g. metadata appended to exif) because I have had several instances of something like this corrupting my originals. Admittedly this was more in the days of jpg rather than camera raw, but still.
 
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I can't quite do this with LR/Transporter. You can take the full folder name and load it into another piece of metadata, but you can't directly load into Keywords -- you can only load into LR/Transporter's temporary keywords field, which can then be copied into the real keywords field on export.

And you can only get the full folder name, not a substring of it.

So I'd be inclined to script this with Exiftool, then get it into Lightroom using Read Metadata From Files. But you said you didn't want to touch the originals, so hopefully you're using proprietary raw files -- then you could write the keywords into XMP sidecar files instead.
 
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Brad Snyder;29'93 said:
How many folders are we talking about? Each image in a given folder will be keyworded the same, and with just the 'key term' from the folder name?
Click to expand...


I have 8'''' images and about 15'' folders. Having each image in the folder all with the words contained in the parent folder name is exactly what I want.
 
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That's a pretty major job, and something LR's not cut out for, at least at this point in time.

You mention Extensis Portfolio can do it - do you have Portfolio - or could you download a trial for it? That might be the easiest solution - let Portfolio create the keywords for you, let it write those back to the files/xmp sidecars, and then import into LR.
 
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Portfolio won't write sidecars, and only writes back to TIF and JPEG files.

What other software do you have? For example, a Bridge script could handle this, on one in iView. It would need a certain intelligence too, being able to exclude the year and month from keywords.

It is a shame that Adobe haven't yet implemented a common scripting language for Lightroom.

John
 
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Thanks everyone for all the input so far.

I probably should have also explained what my aim of having the keywords was - to be able to search for words contained in my parent folders name. As I am still learning LR, it hadn't occurred to me so far to just try and search for a word used in an images parent folder's text string.

Guess what - it just works. Text -> any searchable field.

So while I havent solved what I asked for, I have the same end result I wanted all along. Im such a cactus :)

Toby
 
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Do so love a problem so easily solved Toby! And hey, you got our grey matter working, which is never a bad thing!
 
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That'll teach us. We almost always try to ask "What's the end goal of this workflow?", because there's frequently a different (possibly better) approach to the obective.
 
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