Lightroom Keywording (again)

[PatrickC]

Some of you may remember my posts about transferring over five years of keywording into Lightroom. It's now done (almost!).

I've been away travelling for three months and have only just got back to finishing it off.

Before going further, I should say that in accordance with my normal practice of only upgrading every other new version - my only way to take practical steps to counter Adobe's innocuous practice of overcharging UK buyers - I'm still using 1.4.

To make a usable Keyword Tags panel, I opted to use non-export top-level keywords and some similar second level. I type these in all caps to distinguish them easily. To make the list accessible and logical, I opted to use the old dodge of leading spaces to force the order. So, my top-level keywords include, for example, [sp]PLACES, [sp]PEOPLE, [sp]OBJECTS & THINGS ([sp]=space).

The reason for the leading spaces is to force the non-exporting keywords to the top of the list, because I will sometimes generate new exportable keywords which will start out at the top level, and will later be moved further into the hierarchy. The list quickly becomes unusable if the two types are intermixed. Also, if I import images with existing keywords which occur twice or more in my list, LR places a new instance of the word in the top level, because LR doesn't know which of the existing instances to chose.

But I'm finding that I can't get the keywords to identify themselves reliably from the Keywords panel on the right hand side. If I begin to type a word, it correctly offers me a hierarchical option from the existing keywords. But if I accept this by pressing 'enter', LR will create a new top-level keyword without the leading space, and will not use the existing instance of the word. So, for example, I type 'fire' and LR suggests
"fire > INTANGIBLE THINGS > OBJECTS & THINGS" (note that there are 2 spaces after each >);
I press enter, and end up with a new entry:
"OBJECTS & THINGS>INTANGIBLE THINGS>fire" as well as the existing
" OBJECTS & THINGS> INTANGIBLE THINGS>fire".

I'm really finding this process annoying in the extreme. I've put in weeks of work to get to where I am, but the system seems set up to sabotage my best attempts to use it.

Any suggestions? Is there any substantial change to the keywording in LR2 which might make me change my policy.

Best regards

Patrick Cunningham

 

[Brad Snyder]

Yes, there are substantial changes in LR2 keywording, including several changes within both the application and filtering methodology. It now handles capitalization much better, but I don't have any idea about your leading/trailing space convention.

There's a free trial, you should probably have a look. Eeek, I just remembered there is a bug in the upgrade process, which leaves all the keyword property tags unset, on catalog upgrade. There's a patch script to fix it, that is reported to work well.

I assume there's a reason you don't want to use a more recognizable escape character, such as an underscore? Since these are non-exporting category headers, on the surface, it wouldn't seem to matter too much.

 

[PatrickC]

Hummm.... maybe I'm being dull, I just didn't think of that! Easily worth a try, I'll do it - thanks Brad.

Patrick