Having decided how you’ll keyword your photos and whether to use a flat list or hierarchy (Lightroom Classic), you’re ready to start assigning keywords to your photos. All the principles we looked at before apply to both versions of Lightroom, but adding them is slightly different on each.
First rule – don’t go overboard!
Don’t go overboard, especially to start with. If you try to add 30 keywords to every photo you’ve ever taken, it can become an overwhelming job, so just start with a few significant keywords on your best photos.
Lightroom (cloud-based): Adding your first keywords
In Lightroom (cloud-based) and Lightroom mobile, it’s easy to add keywords:
- Mobile: Go to Detail view then select Keywords view (iOS) / Info view (Android) and simply enter the keyword(s) – separate multiple keywords by a comma.
Desktop: Open the Keywords panel by clicking the Tag icon in the bottom right-hand corner and activate the Add Keyword field.- Desktop: to add (or delete) keywords on multiple photos at once, go to Grid view, select the photos and enter the keyword(s).
On Lightroom (cloud) it’s as simple as that, but don’t forget they don’t sync back to Lightroom Classic.
Lightroom (cloud-based): Finding photos using keywords
Once you’ve keyworded your photos, it’s really easy to find ones with specific keywords, just by typing in the Search field. The text Search field is always found at the top of the Lightroom desktop window, and the shortcut Ctrl-F (Windows) / Cmd-F (Mac) moves the cursor to the Search field. To access the search field on mobile, tap the magnifying glass icon at the top of Organize/Grid view.
Lightroom searches the photos in the current view. To search all of your photos, select All Photos at the top of the My Photos panel (desktop) / Organize view (mobile).
To delete a search term, click/tap on its token.
To cancel the search, click/tap the X at the end of the search criteria.
With Lightroom connected to the cloud, you can even search on terms that you haven’t got around to keywording. Adobe Cloud uses an AI learning tool, called Adobe Sensei. This enables you to use terms like boat, car, dog and it’ll find ones that it thinks match. If you have your own keyword that Sensei also recognizes, you’ll see it listed twice and you can select the one you want to search on (your own keyword or the Sensei one).
Remember, Lightroom (cloud/mobile) keywords don’t currently sync to / from Lightroom Classic. Many people have requested this – here’s the feature request to add your vote if it’s important to you.
Lightroom Classic: Adding your first keywords
In Lightroom Classic, there are numerous ways to add keywords to your photos, including:
- Type in the Keywording panel.
- Create a new keyword using the Keyword List panel.
- Click the Keyword Suggestion buttons in the Keywording panel.
- Use Keyword Sets to group your most frequently used keywords.
- Assign an existing keyword using the checkbox in the Keyword List panel.
- Click and drag to/from the Keyword List panel.
- Use the Painter tool to quickly assign keywords.
- Use a Keyboard Shortcut.
- Use Face Recognition for names of people.
To help you get started, we’ll cover the first two options, but for more detailed information, see pages 127-140 in our Adobe Lightroom Classic – The Missing FAQ book.
Lightroom Classic: Type in the Keywording panel
Select the first photo, perhaps in Loupe view, and go to the Keywording panel in the right panel group in Library. Click in the keywords field that says Click here to add keywords (or the field above) and type your keywords, separating them with a comma (,). As you start to reuse keywords, they’ll be suggested as you start typing, which helps to avoid differences in spelling. When you’ve finished, press the Enter key and your keywords appear in the Keyword List panel, as well as being attached to the selected photo.
Lightroom Classic: Create and apply keywords using the Keyword List panel
At the top of the Keyword List panel is a + button, which is used for creating new keywords without applying them to the selected photo. Click the + button and enter your keyword in the Create Keyword Tag dialog.
There are a number of additional options in this dialog. They’re all explained in a diagram on page 135-136 in our Adobe Lightroom Classic – The Missing FAQ book (the interaction is complicated!), but there are three we’ll look out for here:
- Unchecking Include on Export is useful if it’s a parent (grouping) keyword such as WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, etc. I suggest using all caps when naming these keywords, so they can be identified at a glance.
- If another keyword is already selected in the Keyword List panel, it offers to Put inside [keyword]. This is useful when building your keyword hierarchy. Once the keyword is created, you can also drag/drop keywords onto each other, but we’ll come back to this next week.
- If one or more photos are selected when you’re creating the new keyword, Add to selected photos automatically applies the new keyword at the same time. If you forget, click the square to the left of the keyword in the Keyword List panel, which adds a checkmark.
If you want to add the same keyword to a lot of photos, for example, you have a series of photos of snow, select them all in Grid view (it must be Grid view!) before typing the keyword in the Keywording panel or checking the checkbox in the Keyword List panel.
Lightroom Classic: Finding photos using keywords
Once you’ve keyworded your photos, there are a number of ways of finding the photos again later. But for now, here’s the easiest… simply click the arrow on the right of the keyword in the Keyword List panel. This opens the Metadata Filters to the right keyword. When you’re finished, click None at the top of the Grid view.
Have you already been doing some keywording, but created a mess? Or you want to convert your flat list to a hierarchy, or vice versa? Don’t worry, we’ll tidy up in the next post.
For extensive information on Lightroom Classic, see Adobe Lightroom Classic – The Missing FAQ.
If you have the Photography Plan, then as well as Classic you have access to the Lightroom cloud ecosystem including the mobile apps and web interface. For more information on these apps, see Adobe Lightroom – Edit Like a Pro.
Note: purchase of these books includes the first year’s Classic or cloud-based Premium Membership (depending on the book purchased), giving access to download the latest eBook (each time Adobe updates the software), email assistance for the applicable Lightroom version if you hit a problem, and other bonuses.
We also have a special bundle offer for the two books. This includes Premium Membership for the first year as described above for the whole Lightroom family!
Originally posted 3 April 2017, updated for current Lightroom versions, May 2020.
If the parent keyword of a hierarchy is put into or surrounded by brackets, for example [WHO], it will not be included in the display of keywords that are shown when you select “Include on Export” and won’t be exported.
If you’re creating them in a text file, you mean Ken? Yes, you’re right.
Is there a way to delete all the suggestions in the keyword suggestion panel?
Not that I can think of, no. You could toggle the disclosure triangle to hide them. Is there a particular reason you want to do so?
I create new keywords on the fly, as needed, while I’m lettering my newly imported photos. To save time, I put them into the proper hierarchy by using the “less than” sign: <
E.g., I just returned from my first trip to Bordeaux (fabulous, by the way, on AMA Waterways) and keywords the photos I took there. I wanted all of them to include the keyword "Bordeax" and I wanted that new keyword to exist under the keyword "France" in my hierarchy. So, the first time I typed it in, I typed Bordeaux< France.
When I use it again I only have to type Bordeaux, of course.
I would recommend using the City filed as part of the location metadata to tag “Bordeaux”, and the Country field to tag “France”. The location metadata is great to tag specific places. I save my “WHERE” tag and sub-tags for things I can’t tag using location metadata (e.g. place names or place types), such as “Church”, “Museum”, “Zoo” etc. Also, famous landmarks go nicely under the “WHAT” grouping, such as “WHAT” -> “Landmark” -> “Eiffel Tower”. Just sharing my thoughts 🙂
Good ideas Brendon, thanks for sharing!
More than keywords I prefer to use descriptive captions that are searchable as well.
I started using Lightroom mobile on the iPad and I can not seem to find a way to paste caption test to multiple photos at once. It is possible on Lightroom classic and on Lightroom mobile for android since 2019. I wonder why such an important feature is not available on iOS and iPad.
I need to provide captioned images to my editorial clients. This makes editing a shoot on the iPad very slow.
I wonder why Adobe is not implementing this.
iOS and Android do have slightly different development times, with some features appearing on one before the other. I’m sure it will come, but suggest adding a Feature Request to boost the importance!
Apologies if this isn’t the best place to post this but I’m still looking for suggestions – given ADOBE’s baffling reluctance to solve what is, on the face of it, a simple problem.
The continuing most irritating problem with Keywording for me remains the inability to filter by complex keywords. Virtually all my images (fauna mostly) have keywords assigned as part of a controlled, hierarchical, scientific vocabulary.
To give a simple example, this means if I try to filter the keyword list to find “Bombus distinguendus” the filter will return images of every species of BOMBUS (bumblebee) that I have on the system. And if I try to search on the English keywords which I always also use the problem is even worse. Filter for the “Common Butterfly Bat” and it will return literally hundreds of suggestions from all families of animals.
Of course, this would be solved if ADOBE allowed a mechanism for searching or filtering on a whole text string or by some boolean logic. Almost every database in the world allows this so I’ve no idea why Adobe sets its face against it. I live in hope, but I occasionally post a plea for help in case someone has spotted an elegant solution to this annoyance. Or even better – that Adobe has fixed it and I haven’t noticed.
Hey ho.
It’s the first time I’ve heard it requested for filtering the keyword list, rather than just filtering keywords. There’s a couple of tips in this thread that may or may not help: https://feedback.photoshop.com/conversations/lightroom-classic/lightroom-classic-boolean-type-searches-of-metadata-andor-keywords/5fd516d55fcf364c35d051cc
You can use the “contains all” option in the keyword search to get the “and”. The “contains” option is an “or”
Sorry, sollte ich mit meiner Frage hier falsch sein, bin zu ersten Mal hier.
Jetzt zu meinem Problem: Ich will zwei Schlüsselwörter direkt beim Import automatisch einfügen, das hat auch mal funktioniert. Ich habe die Schlüsselwörter bei “Einstellungen für den automatischen Import” eingetragen. Außerdem wird auch das von mir erstellte Preset und unter “Entwicklungseinstellungen” ausgewählt nicht mehr ausgeführt. Das hat auch mal funktioniert aktuell aber nicht mehr. Das Preset an sich funktioniert wenn ich es bei einem ausgewählten Bild anwenden will. Ich weiß leider nicht seit wann beides nicht mehr beim Import funktioniert, ist mir erst gestern aufgefallen.