• Welcome to the Lightroom Queen Forums! We're a friendly bunch, so please feel free to register and join in the conversation. If you're not familiar with forums, you'll find step by step instructions on how to post your first thread under Help at the bottom of the page. You're also welcome to download our free Lightroom Quick Start eBooks and explore our other FAQ resources.
  • Stop struggling with Lightroom! There's no need to spend hours hunting for the answers to your Lightroom Classic questions. All the information you need is in Adobe Lightroom Classic - The Missing FAQ!

    To help you get started, there's a series of easy tutorials to guide you through a simple workflow. As you grow in confidence, the book switches to a conversational FAQ format, so you can quickly find answers to advanced questions. And better still, the eBooks are updated for every release, so it's always up to date.
  • Dark mode now has a single preference for the whole site! It's a simple toggle switch in the bottom right-hand corner of any page. As it uses a cookie to store your preference, you may need to dismiss the cookie banner before you can see it. Any problems, please let us know!

Library module Yet again ?s about Keyword Hierarchy

Status
Not open for further replies.

OogieM

Active Member
Premium Classic Member
Joined
May 28, 2012
Messages
152
Location
Colorado
Lightroom Experience
Intermediate
Lightroom Version
Operating System:Mac OS X Sierra
Exact Lightroom Version (Help menu > System Info):Lightroom Classic version: 7.1 [ 1148620 ]

I know nearly everyone is tired of this but I want to run some ideas by the experts here and if you see any glaring issues or pitfalls I am blissfully unaware of please enlighten me.

In the massive reorganization of my keywording scheme I have realized that animals are a huge portion of my collection of personal images.

What I am doing is my top level has a group ANIMAL. Below that are keywords for basic animal families so while I do not totally follow the scientific nomenclature I am implementing it at least partially. Feline, Canine, Equine, Bovine and Ovine are all families and the keyword includes the scientific terminology as a synonym. Some groups are not as well defined, Reptile has snakes, lizards as keywords but turtles and tortoises are just in the Reptile group because I don't have many pictures of them. My thinking is that I only subdivide the group when there are too many photos in that group and I need it more finely divided. This is working for now but I'm concerned that it might become a problem as I start to include the thousands of pictures we are scanning from my parents, grandparents and so on. So that is the first question, should I populate the full tree even though only a few pictures are in the bottom leaf?

Another issue is that for many species the sexes and the age of the animal can change their noun. For example take the domestic sheep, there are rams (male), ewes (female), lambs (under 1 year of age), hogget (1-2 years of age), wether (castrated male) and so on. I originally had the sex/age keywords under the bottom level so domestic sheep (synonym Ovis aires) was documented as ANIMAL/Ovine/sheep/domestic_sheep/ and then several bottom level keywords Breed_BWMS, ewe, lamb, Desert_Weyr_Ginny, ram_lamb, Desert_Weyr_Wibbly, Desert_Weyr_Wobbly, Desert_Weyr_Webley which is the name of the ewe (Ginny) and her triplets, all ram lambs with their registered names as well as what breed they are (Black Welsh Mountain). I actually search for pictures of specific sheep so I treat many of them like humans with a full name included as a keyword.

The issue comes in when I now start adding pictures of bighorn sheep which are ANIMAL/Ovine/sheep/mountain_bighorn/ or ANIMAL/Ovine/sheep/desert_bighorn/ and then the same set of sex and age keywords. This can be confusing when I look at it.

I am considering placing an upper level tag called SEX_AGE and under it having all the various animal keywords that denote age and sex. ram, ewe lamb, ram_lamb, ewe_lamb, calf, cow, bull, heifer, gilt, sow, boar, piglet, foal, filly, mare, stallion, gelding, jenny, jack, buck, doe, kid, fawn, etc. etc. etc The male, female or castrate sex is a synonym in the above examples.

This will also men that as I start adding the zoo animal pictures I am not duplicating the sex/age keywords over and over for each species.

Related is the idea of multiple bottom level leaf words being attached to a single picture. It appears to be working well but I'm wondering if I am missing something that will come back to bite me when I have 100K pictures all cataloged (my current estimate of the total number of eventual images in the LR catalog).

I'm wondering if I am setting myself up for some other issues if I do this. I have only fully keyworded about 1000 pictures so now is the time to define the structure before I have gone too far into the project.
 
Hi,

It is quite easy to go down the rabbit hole with keywording. I think a good question to keep in mind is "Just because you can do you need to?'". In other words I suggest that you consider exactly how you need to access your collection and that should provide you guidance for exactly how detailed you want to be with your keywords.

I consider hierarchal keywords useful in primarily two ways. One as a shortcut to apply multiple terms at a time. This can speed up keywording considerably as applying two or three hierarchies can end up a dozen or more terms. Second is that a thoughtfully constructed keyword hierarchy created a virtual organization to of your images. This can be accessed directly in the Grid library filters or through Smart collections.

There is as you are discovering a trade off between construction a detailed hierarchy and an a usable one. So the level of detail should only go as deep as you think you will need in order to access that information in the future.

Construct your primary hierarchies with just the unique characteristics that you want to keep track of. So for your sheep category under sheep have ram, ewe, lamb etc.. Then consider using keyword synonyms to add additional information like scientific names. Unfortunately I don't believe that synonyms are still searchable in the filter bar or in Smart Collections.

Consider adding separate hierarchies to deal with attributes that are common across multiple categories rather than trying to stuff everything into one hierarchy. Also don't shy away from having multiple hierarchies contain duplicate terms. However, if you find that you are trying to add the same terms into more than a few different hierarchies then you may want to break it out into its own,

Finally I suggest that you get and learn to use John R. Ellis's Any Tag plugin. It has additional functionality not available in the Lightroom keyword interface. Especially the added ability to search you keyword list for synonyms. A powerful feature in you need it.

I hope that this helps.

-louie
 
Unfortunately I don't believe that synonyms are still searchable in the filter bar or in Smart Collections.
They are certainly searchable in smart collections. Just search by keyword. I think they are also searchable in the filter bar, because you can search on 'any searchable text field' if I'm not mistaken (typing this on my iPad, so I can't check that).
 
How are you going to remember which keyword, or keywords you will need to add to the next lot of photos; and which keyword or keywords you are going to use for a search? That is a bit of a problem for me anyway at times :(
I have a "sort of" rule: a keyword should have at least 20 or so photos attached to it. It's not that hard to visually search 20 or so; or more photos to find 'that one' photo.
I'm also thinking you might be able to add a description into file name

is there a business reason for your 1000 keywords?
And are other people going to be using these keywords to find a photo
That could make difference to how you need to set it up
 
How are you going to remember which keyword, or keywords you will need to add to the next lot of photos; and which keyword or keywords you are going to use for a search? ... is there a business reason for your 1000 keywords?
And are other people going to be using these keywords to find a photo
That could make difference to how you need to set it up

I don't understand the initial question, In the process of keywording, especially zoo animals, I refer to the species identification info I have to get the right keywords. It's easy to peruse a set of keywords and search for them. The structure is actually a response to searching for photos and being unable to find them. When I have 5000 pictures of Black Welsh Mountain sheep ewes and lambs finding the ones of Desert Weyr Gwen or Bunny can take more time than I have. It's useful to locate photos of the same sheep over their lifetime for comparison, hence the named sheep keywords.

I don't yet have 1000 keywords, I've just tested the system on 1000 pictures.

Yes, there are multiple people who nee dot be able to search for photos. Myself, my husband, my stepdad, the members fo the sheep association, the member sof the historical society, the livestock conservancy just to name a few.
 
To amplify Louie's excellent advice, don't try to cram everything into one hierarchy. You seem to be trying to use the Linnaean system and then adding names, sex, etc etc. If I wanted to be really strict about animals, I'd use a controlled vocabulary and just use that system for a hieararchy, and not add anything to it. So a zoologist would recognize it immediately. Then a separate hierarchy for common names, if need be, in case you don't remember what ovis canadensis is, or want "mountain sheep" for those you saw in mountains vs those you saw in the desert. Or, better, you'd got an "environment" or "habitat" hierarchy, so it's gonna be a search for "canadensis" in the Linnaean hierarchy and "desert" in the biomes hierarchy or wherever, or maybe you'd use "Grand Canyon" as the second term in a location>Parks>US>National>Grand Canyon hierarchy.

And for sex, use sex>male, etc. and/or a common name hiearchy as well, like horse>stallion, horse>mare, etc. But remember, you already know that a male sheep is a ram, so maybe forget "ram" as a keyword altogether. Is it gonna help you find male sheep? And there are a lot of things named "ram," from NFL players to Dodge trucks to mechanical devices. Point being, sometimes adding more keywords can make things less easy to find.

Another example is your excellent thought about the sheep: treat 'em as people since they have names or some other identifier. Lr can find faces of animals; I've got some pets in there and just use the pet names.

And as far as adding things to the list that aren't in pictures, that can work. You might wanna even consider buying a controlled vocabulary list where someone else has done much of the work, and you've just gotta apply them. Adobe Lightroom Controlled Vocabulary Keyword Catalog and Hierarchy for Hierarchical Keywording of Stock Images and photographs for image databases
 
I would agree with a couple of posts here that it is much the better approach to separate hierarchies that cover different subjects.
Gender-specific names for animals should be in its own hierarchy. Animal (species) need to be in their own hierarchy.
Separate out different concerns for their own hierarchies...

I can say that this is the way that I have approached hierarchical keywording and I have many tens of thousands of keywords in my keyword hierarchies (I have not checked lately but it is > 50 000...)
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top