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Missing keywords

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dougtatephotography

New Member
Joined
Mar 18, 2020
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14
Lightroom Version Number
Lightroom Classic 13.1
Operating System
  1. Windows 11
Hello all,
I recently discovered an issue that I was hoping to get some insight on. Since I started using Lightroom Classic in 2015, I always keyword all of my photos. About a month ago I ran out of internal hard drive space, so I ended up transferring all photos to a large external hard drive, but I left my Lightroom catalog on the internal hard drive. Once everything was setup that way, it seemed to be working just fine until today when I discovered that I am missing all of my keywording on approximately 90% plus, of my photos. Randomly the keywords show up in a few of the photo files. Any help would be much appreciated.
Thank you,
Doug
 
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Keywords are stored in the catalog, not in the images. How did you transfer these photos to the other drive, and did you do anything with them in the catalog, like removing the photos and then re-importing them from the external drive?
 
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Last week, I had a similar problem. All of my KW's were missing (over 20,000 of them). They were just plain gone. The Keyword List panel was empty and there were no Keyword List filters in use and I had selected "All" (rather than People or Other).

I unzipped my latest backup (the night before) to a new folder and opened the LrC catalog from that backup and they were all there. But, before I went ahead with overwriting my master catalog with the revovered one, I re-lanuched my master and for no apparent reason all the KW's were back. I have absolutly no clue as to what happened or if it was a Windows or an Adobe issue. I suspect space aliens. Since then no problems.
 
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I realize the keywords are within the LR catalog, What's odd is some are there, but most are not. I started looking at other things, and noticed most, but not all my color labels were also missing. What I ended up doing was launched Lightroom from a recent backup catalog, and everything seems to be back to normal. For whatever reason, it looks like the catalog was corrupt.
 
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dougtatephotography said:
I realize the keywords are within the LR catalog, What's odd is some are there, but most are not. I started looking at other things, and noticed most, but not all my color labels were also missing. What I ended up doing was launched Lightroom from a recent backup catalog, and everything seems to be back to normal. For whatever reason, it looks like the catalog was corrupt.
Click to expand...
Did you actually run a scan on the catalog as part of the exit/backup process?
 
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Califdan said:
Last week, I had a similar problem. All of my KW's were missing (over 20,000 of them). They were just plain gone. The Keyword List panel was empty and there were no Keyword List filters in use and I had selected "All" (rather than People or Other).

I unzipped my latest backup (the night before) to a new folder and opened the LrC catalog from that backup and they were all there. But, before I went ahead with overwriting my master catalog with the revovered one, I re-lanuched my master and for no apparent reason all the KW's were back. I have absolutly no clue as to what happened or if it was a Windows or an Adobe issue. I suspect space aliens. Since then no problems.
Click to expand...
Did you export just your keyword list as a backup? I do a periodic keyword export in addition to catalog backups every time I exit Lightroom. The extra few seconds it takes Lightroom are well worth the effort compared to HOURS to redo work that was lost because I didn't do backups.
 
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