Locations enter as metadata or as keywords?

[WildVanilla]

Hi

The subject of this post has been bugging me for ages, but I thought I'd finally try and do something about it!

Ever since I've used Lightroom I've been tagging locations onto my photos in two different ways:
1. In the metadata / location box, e.g. ISO: GB, Country: United Kingdom, State / Province: North Yorkshire, City: York, Sublocation: York Minster
2. As a keyword hierarchy, e.g. United Kingdom > England > North Yorkshire > York > York Minster

Obviously this is duplication, which as my LR collection has grown over the years is giving me twice the work I need. So I'm thinking of binning one of these methods.

I'm erring towards keeping method #1 and binning method #2. Is that what other people would recommend? Are there any pros and cons to each?

All advice gratefully received

Rob

 

[johnbeardy]

Both.

The beauty of the four IPTC fields is that they can be displayed in the Library Filter as columns, so you can see everything from N Yorkshire, then filter down to York, then to the Minster. It's very clear, which is good and bad - what happens when your picture location could be equally the Shambles and the Minster (assuming that's possible) ?

Keywords are much more flexible, so you could have more than one "leaf" keyword - Minster and Shambles. That's good too, perhaps it's less easy to drill down using the Library Filter. Outside Lightroom, keywords are more likely to be used elsewhere - eg on Flickr.

My own way is to focus on making the duplication more efficient. So I have a number of Lake District presets which set both the keywords and the location fields. I have a few Keyword Sets for the region. And I also use my Search Replace plugin's workflow filter command (free) to copy the IPTC location fields into the keywords.

John

 

[WildVanilla]

My own way is to focus on making the duplication more efficient. So I have a number of Lake District presets which set both the keywords and the location fields. I have a few Keyword Sets for the region. And I also use my Search Replace plugin's workflow filter command (free) to copy the IPTC location fields into the keywords.

Thanks, John. I'll give this a go, as I guess my issue isn't really as much the existence of the duplication than the effort required to manually sustain it

Rob

 

[WildVanilla]

A quick query please ,John: does the IPTC keyword have to be in the keywood root, e.g.~IPTC locations is OK but not GEOGRAPHIC > IPTC locations?

 

[johnbeardy]

Yes, it does. You could change it to GEOGRAPHIC, but only if that's a top level keyword.

 

[WildVanilla]

Yes, it does. You could change it to GEOGRAPHIC, but only if that's a top level keyword.

Thanks, that makes sense.

At the moment I have a Geographic > Continent > Country etc. hierarchy. So all I need to do is drag my Country items under the new IPTC locations keyword, and leave continents as they are. (Or I could even create pseudo-synonyms, e.g. have Europe as a synonym for Germany, but the purist in me balks at that!)

 

[johnbeardy]

Hm, never thought of including continents. One or two countries may cause a problem - eg Turkey, Russia. So from a purist perspective, continent could be a different high level keyword.

 

[clee01l]

I use both Keyword location and the IPTC Location fields. I almost always use a camera mounted GPS to record the coordinates and LR will do the reverse look up to fill in the IPTC fields. Keywords are useful to describe the place and event more accurately. "My Backyard" is more descriptive than the sublocation field of "Westmoreland Farms Subd."

 

[tspear]

IPTC fields for me for the most part. Common places I visit, such as my home, my parents house... I have keywords set up for.
Now I am wondering if I should not use John's search and replace tool and expand my set some more.

 

[rob211]

Sort of depends on how you need to find things, etc.

I love keywords, but outside of Adobe applications and some other software you lose the hierarchies. With some clever AND searches you can sort of make up for that, but it's a pain.

OTOH, a location has that info baked in. "Paris" is in the city tag, so it's like city>Paris. As distinguished from say person>Paris. So I find my locations (i.e. info put in the location fields) is in fact preferable if the point is finding shots of the city of Paris. Or say Leiscester City the city vs Leiscester City the club. So I always use the location fields.

I still keep the keywords, though, mainly because the location fields get funky after first sublocation. And city is kinda worthless to me since I travel so much outside of cities. So stuff like US>National park>Yosemite>Tuolumne Meadows is still important. And obviously there's gonna be overlap, like US>CA>San Francisco>Golden Gate Park>Stow Lake with the locations of city, state, country.