What are top level keywords in your hierarchy?

[hammer88]

I'm not a professional by any means. Just a regular guy who has tons of photos of friends and family and is trying to be anal about his keyword hierarchy structure.

I'd like to know what your top level keywords are. The only ones I have at the moment are below:

People
--coworkers
--family
--friends
Places
--country
----state
------city
--------place (notable theaters, landmarks)

Would you guys put restaurants under the city? Is it a big deal if you end up with multiple entries in other city (ie - fast food restaurants)

I'm thinking about a third big one for occassion / events / holidays / sports games but I can't put my finger on the proper vocabulary word to head that section.

How about one for actions? eating, drinking, playing, hooping, surfing, snowboarding, etc.

Any suggestions?

 

[wblink]

I'd like to know what your top level keywords are. The only ones I have at the moment are below:

People
--coworkers
--family
--friends
Places
--country
----state
------city
--------place (notable theaters, landmarks)

I am too looking for a good standard (to me that is important) for keywords. The things you mention under "Places" can be found and imported in the metadata, so I don't really see why I should have them as extra keywords.
Or do I miss something?

 

[Katherine Mann]

I tend to keep my top level keywords to a minimum. I also confine them to things that I might want to actually retrieve as a group. For instance, I might want to look at all the pictures that I have of my dog Morgan. But Morgan is obviously a subset of "dog" and that a subset of "fauna". I take a lot of pictures of living creatures and they are all under either "flora" or "fauna". It's easy to drill down from there.

There are obviously a zillion different categories that you could establish but it works best if you keep it to the things that you are interested in.

My top levels are this:
Events
Fauna
Flora
People
Places
Themes
Things

My rule for myself is that if I can't imagine wanting to see a group of photos of something, then there is no need for a category.

 

[Guy Scharf]

My top level categories are:

Animals
Birds
Clients
Events
Family
People
Places
Plants
Scenic
Technical
Things
Usage

I'm probably going to move the Technical under Usage. Birds and Places are the most populated categories and go three or four levels deep. The Family category will eventually expand too.

Here's what my Places directory looks like:

Places
--country
---state
----county
-----city
------place

Birds has subdivisions for family and then species.

 

[Bruce J]

I try to keep my top level list small and orthogonal (ie. so that there are no dependencies or duplications across top level keywords). Currently, I have these:

Event
Location (in IPTC)
People
Status
Subject

There are a large number of 2nd level keywords under subject. I suppose People could also be a second level keyword under Subject, but I often want to find all of the photos of a particular person, whether or not the person is the subject of the photo.

I use Status to keep track of original images vs. processed images, and the stage of processing, etc. That way, I can have a bunch of versions of a single original stacked together and can keep track of either what I did to each, or the purpose of each.

 

[BigIUFan]

Events, Locations, People, Published, Subjects.

I use Locations in keywords instead of IPTC because IPTC is very city-centric and most of my photos are not made in cities.

I'm not sure why the IPTC Location value should be considered "city-centric." It is geographic based, but can be used by itself in the absence of city information. I put any location information that makes sense. "Dad's House", "Little League Park", "Central Park", etc. all mean something to me.

If I expect Location to mean something to others then I might make appropriate changes to reflect that. Otherwise I feel like it is redundant to include a keyword indicating a location.

My $.'2

 

[Denis Pagé]

I'd like to know what your top level keywords are. The only ones I have at the moment are below:

People
--coworkers
--family
--friends

But what if a Coworker is also Friend?

This is why I just have a "Names" (People) top level. If it grows too much, I may add A, B, C... excluding them from export as for "Names".

 

[Denis Pagé]

If a coworker is also a friend, you assign both keywords to him.

:roll: Seem right! But I taught that under that, "John Doe" for example may be duplicated both under Friends and Coworkers... So, in this case, which "John Doe" do we assign? I do not like the idea of duplicating keywords. Do Lightroom treats both as the same?

BTW, "John doe" is banned from my keywords. He is so well known that I am afraid it will show 1236548215546 images.

 

[Etrsi_645]

Events
Objects
People
Places
Styles

 

[hammer88]

What do you put under Styles?

Events
Objects
People
Places
Styles

 

[hammer88]

Winston,

You're defeating the purpose of hierarchical keywords if you structure it like that. If you had People->Friend->John Doe, then all you need to do is tag your photo with John Doe and all the above structure will export with your photos. That's one of the big benefits of keyword hierarchy.

I haven't played with the placement of names of coworkers in both friends and coworkers. But what I've done is this.

People
--coworkers
----acme inc
--------jane doe (just a coworker not a friend)
--friends
-----john doe

I'll then tag John Doe's picture as john doe and acme inc.

I do it like this:

People
---Doe
-----John
-----Jane
---Coworker
---Friend

A photo of John Doe would have three keywords: John, Coworker, and Friend. His wife Jane would have two keywords: Jane, and Friend.