Keywords with commas chaos

[Tomas Griger]

I've found lots of duplicated keywords in my photos recently. I figured out the problem is that somehow, keywords appeared in my catalog that actually contain several keywords separated by commas. I don't know how they appeared, it could be via import from external file. This is causing a real mess in my keywords. Any idea how to separate them out to individual keywords?

 

[Johan Elzenga]

That's a strange one. Keywords are by default separated by commas, although you can also separate them by spaces. That is an option in the Lightroom Preferences, under 'Interface'. You seem to have keywords with spaces in them ('Aegean Sea', DR Congo), but also with commas. That should not be possible. It looks like Lightroom is making a mess from a hierarchy. Try resetting your preferences first.

 

[rob211]

Bizarre. If one tries to enter a comma while keywording in Lr it gets rejected with a stern warning. I suspect these somehow got imported.

Can you use exiftool or something similar to see what's actually in one of the offending images?

And what do you get if you export keywords into a text file?

Also, if you export some of those images as a new catalog, does the problem persist?

 

[Tony Jay]

I would say that each of those lines with apparent multiple keywords is being interpreted by Lightroom as a single keyword.
I agree that it is likely that what it seen in that screenshot is the result of an import.

Tony Jay

 

[Johan Elzenga]

Yes, it obviously must be the result of an import. You can't achieve this in Lightroom even if you wanted to. But even an import should not give this result...

 

[johnbeardy]

Maybe say more about "import from external file". What does that mean? And what language are you working in? In Lr's Preferences, what is the setting for Interface > Keyword Entry ? Is it not commas?

 

[Ian.B]

No idea; however you seem to have a lot keywords for one or two images. I would be thinking you might be taking keywording are bit too far thus opening it up to mistakes . Most of my keywords are signal words however you and I have different uses for our keyworks

Just an observation. Others might like to comment on this also

 

[Johan Elzenga]

I believe it's time to wait for the OP to answer some questions, like what happens if he resets the preferences. All we can do is speculate if he does not respond. Keywords are not only for you to find your photos, they can also be meant for stock photos. In that case it is not uncommon to have dozens of keywords assigned to one image.

 

[Tomas Griger]

Thank you all for your help, I tried all you recommended, but nothing worked. I had to manually delete the keywords and re-do the keywording of the images.

However, I figured out how the keywords managed to get into my library. It was via import from .csv file using plug-in "LR/Transporter". There is a warning down at the bottom during importing this way that *Keywords should be semicolon separated. I had my keywords comma separated, which most likely caused the problem. Still very interesting to see that it is actually possible to import keywords with commas into Lightroom this way. Maybe it'll be useful to someone

 

[gpsmikey]

Thanks for posting what you found. As you say, hopefully it will help someone else avoid dropping through that trap door (or at least let them find what the answer is when they search). Nothing worse than searching with Google etc., finding lots of posts about the same problem but nobody bothers to post the answer when they find it.

 

[kbjshop]

I recently ran into this problem with keywords being combined by commas when imported from LRTransporter.

It is odd, because LRTransporter EXPORTS the keywords as comma separated, but expects them to be semicolon separated when importing them.
I do not see an option in LRTransporter to export keywords the way it wants to see them when imported (and this includes dealing with LR's keyword hierarchy).
Maybe I am missing something, but that seems like an odd oversight in a plugin that has been around for so long.

There is a note in LRTransporters plugin management page that says it relies on exiftool for writing out keywords. I haven't looked closely enough at that aspect of exiftool -- maybe it doesn't speak "Lightroom lingo" for keywords.

Work around: In any case, a simple Find/Replace in a text editor of the comma -> semicolon made the import work as expected, with multiple keywords, rather than a single mushed-together bunch of keywords with a comma in them.

I do not rely on keyword hierarchies, so I do not know of a workaround that can handle them.

Just as an aside, I use LRTransporter when I have to move lots of video files from one catalog to another. With jpgs etc, you can write the metadata to the file, and it shows up when you re-import it to the other catalog. But not for video -- LR won't write keywords into video files.