As the number of photos in your catalog grows, finding a photo is essential. One of the best ways to do this is by assigning keywords to your photo(s). Keyword tags are text metadata used to describe the content of the photo. Unlike collections, keywords can be stored in the metadata of the files and understood by a wide range of software, so your efforts are not wasted, even if you later move to other software.
Image recognition software is already able to identify many subjects, reducing the need for keywords. If your photos are synced to the Lightroom cloud, you can try it today using Search in the Lightroom Web, mobile or cloud-based Desktop apps. The Excire plug-in adds similar functionality to Lightroom Classic locally. However, it’s likely to be some time before software can correctly name your friends and family, or tell the difference between a lesser spotted and great spotted woodpecker, so some keywords are still important.
What kind of keywords would you use to describe your photos?
If you’ve never keyworded photos before, you may be wondering where to start. There are no hard and fast rules for keywording (unless you’re shooting for Stock Photography). Assuming you’re shooting primarily for yourself, the main rule is simple—use keywords that will help you find the photos again later!
For example, they can include:
- Who is in the photo (people – Face Recognition can also be useful)
- What is in the photo (other subjects or objects)
- Where the photo was taken (names of locations)
- Why the photo was taken (what’s happening)
- When the photo was taken (sunrise/sunset, season, event)
- How the photo was taken (HDR, tilt-shift, panoramic)
Before you start applying keywords to photos, think about the kinds of words you would use to search for your photos.
The importance of consistency
While you’re planning the kind of keywords you’ll use, also think about consistency within your keyword list, otherwise you’ll spend a lot of time tidying up your keyword list later. For example:
- Grouping—as with folders and collections, in Lightroom Classic you can use a hierarchical list of keywords instead of a long flat list. We’ll consider the pros and cons in the next post.
- Capitalization—stick to lower case for everything except names of people and places.
- Quantity—either use singular or plural, but avoid mixing them (either have bird, cat and dog or birds, cats and dogs). Where the plural spelling is different, for example, puppy vs. puppies, in Lightroom Classic you can put the other spelling in the Synonyms field so it’s still fully searchable. For Lightroom (cloud-based) stay with one rule, as it doesn’t have Synonyms.
- Verbs—stick to a single form, for example, running, playing, jumping rather than mixing run, play, jumping.
- Name formats—consider how you’ll handle nicknames or last names for married women. Many use the married name followed by the maiden name (e.g., Mary Married née Maiden), while others choose to put previous names and nicknames in the Synonyms field (Lightroom Classic only).
Need some ideas? While controlled vocabularies are overkill for most amateur photographers, they can be a great place to get ideas for your own keywords and list structure. Here’s a list of some popular keyword lists, both free and paid.
In the next post in the series, we’ll consider the advantages and disadvantages in Lightroom Classic of flat and hierarchical keyword lists, and then we’ll put the theory into practice in the following posts.
Note on keywords in Lightroom Classic / Lightroom (Cloud)
While you can add keywords to both versions of Lightroom, be aware that they don’t sync keywords. So, for example, adding keywords in Lightroom mobile won’t populate them in the Lightroom Classic. If you migrate from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom (Cloud) using the migration tool, then keywords are migrated in a flat (non-hierarchical) form to the cloud.
For extensive information on Lightroom Classic, see Adobe Lightroom Classic – The Missing FAQ.
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 20 March 2017, updated for latest Lightroom versions May 2020.
Could someone please advise if it possible to insert key words using cut and paste?
Yes, you’d do that in the Keywording panel in Lightroom Classic.
I can say with confidence that each photo is special for me and I try to sort them by date and select some of them in a separate folder. I mark the best photos with a special symbol, as I use them for the covers of my posts on social networks. Now, thanks to the use of high-tech cameras and drones, it is possible to create excellent photographs that can compete with photographs taken by professionals. My main sources of inspiration have always been social media photography and I try to do something similar but better. I recently took a look at [link removed] and started improving my skills in using drones and taking cool photos.
Chris, we would agree with you over here. Weve found better search results when we keep keywords and tags minimal and broad and use the description fields to describe individuals and/or more granular tyoes of information.
I recently had a coworker ask me for a photo of a person I KNEW was in our library. The reason, it turns out, that he didn’t find it was that he had both the first AND last names spelled slightly wrong. It would be pretty cool if the Search function could be enabled with (or have an option for) “fuzzy” searches where a majority of characters are the same. Essentially partial-word matches, similar to how Google will return near-match results.
That would be a great one to put in a Feature Request for:
https://www.lightroomqueen.com/send-bug-report-feature-request-adobe/
Good article with good tips. The organisation of keywords can meet needs that may be unique to you IMO.
My top level categories are: PHOTOGRAPHY, WHAT, WHERE AND WHO.
PHOTOGRAPHY – mainly genre and kit – e.g.: abstract, blur, bokeh, cityscape, extension tube 20mm, filter ND 4-stop, icm, lightbox, macro, multiple exposure, no keywords, portrait, seascape. street.
WHAT includes a large number of subcategories each containing keywords: Activity, Animal, Art & culture, Clothing, Domestic & workplace, Event, Food & drink, Games & entertainment, Land, Machinery, Plant, Structure & architecture, Symbols marks & signs, Technology, Transport, Weather
WHERE includes geographic subcategories
WHO includes People (named), People (unnamed) and Pets
It works for me, but maybe only me.
Excellent examples, thanks for sharing Andy
I use Lightroom 6 to catalog my entire digital photo library. I store the files on my PC in a single directory, because how I store the photos does not influence how I tag or locate photos whatsoever. The image filename format is “IMG-yyyymmdd-hhmmss.dng”. I use the Adobe DNG format so I can embed my camera raw files in the DNG container, or contain my lossy JPG files. Metadata is the driving force behind organising my digital collection of photos, and spending sufficient time to carefully engineer your keyword structure/taxonomy is key to being able to locate your photos according to your requirements. My taxonomy is organised by the “Who, What, When, Where and Why” abstraction. I don’t need the “Why”, and I don’t need to worry about the “When”, because the camera already embeds the capture date in the file for me. So, I’m simply left with the “Who”, “What” and “Where”.
The “Who” is looked after by face tagging. I only face tag immediate family (parents, grandparents, uncles, aunties and siblings. I don’t face tag cousins or friends. And, I don’t tag my Mum as “Mum”; I tag her with her name, so the photo makes sense to someone other than myself.
The “What” is self-explanatory, and reminds us about the context of the photo. I have a sub tag called “Events” in the “What” tag, to isolate photos taken at Christmas events, birthday events and so on.
The “Where” is interesting. Technically the GEO tagging is the way to go, but if you’ve got photos that pre-date geotagging capabilities in modern cameras/phones, then you’re going to have to decide what to geotag. I’ve personally decided to only geotag residences I’ve lived at. For every other photo, I enter address information, such as Country, City, State and optionally address wherever they are known.
My slightly modified structure is below (de-identified names and places):
What
….Attribute
……..Food
……..Iconic
……..Picturesque
……..Scenic
……..Skyscraper
….Car
……..Car X
……..Car Y
……..Car Z
….Event
……..Festivity
…………Birthday
…………Christmas
…………Graduation
…………Honeymoon
…………Wedding
…………….Reception
……..Photo Shoot
……..Show
……..Travel
…………Holiday
…………Outing
…………Trip
Where
….Airport
….Aquarium
….Beach
….Church
….City
….Hospital
….Hotel
….Landmarks
……..Disneyland
……..Forbidden City
……..Great Wall of China
……..Opera House
……..Summer Palace
……..Tiananmen Square
……..Yodobashi Akiba
….Museum
….Residence
….School
……..School X
……..School Y
……..School Z
….Shrine
….Travel Destination
….Workplace
……..Workplace X
……..Workplace Y
……..Workplace Z
….Zoo
Who
….Person
……..Family
…………Mathew
…………Mark
…………Luke
…………John
….Pet
……..Rex
……..Fido
I use presets to GEO tag all residences I’ve lived at, as I’m only GEO tagging residences in my setup. I setup filters for navigating:
“By Date, Keyword, Location Preset” – This helps me tag photos chronologically (includes Date, Keyword, Country, City, State/Province, Metadata Status, Aspect Ratio, File Type
“By Keyword, Date and Location Preset” – Useful when I’m using the Keyword List panel to jump to all photos with a keyword – Includes Keyword, Date, Country, City, Metadata Status, Aspect Ratio, File Type
“By Keyword Cascading” – Useful when I want to perform an AND search on keywords – Includes Keyword x7
Hope this gives someone inspiration with their tagging.
Very useful approach but leads me to the question if you need to replicate information in other metadata tags? For example, in my WF, I first rename the RAW files and apply basic EXIF metadata definitions using the EXIFTOOL before ADDing them to LR. I’m new to searching so can I look for KEYWORD as well as EXIF values at the same time in LR or other tools?
Using the Metadata filter bar, you can search for a whole bunch of EXIF data as well as keywords, all in the same search, so I wouldn’t worry about replicating information.
Depending on how you name your folders (and if don’t organize them solely by date), they can contain a lot of name and/or location information that doesn’t need to be repeated in keywording. For instance, a Travel folder can contain a subfolder with the name and maybe the year of each country visited, or a Trip folder with a geographical i.d. and date of any trip. That does help simplify the keyword list a bit.
Very true. Although… then that information isn’t available outside of your computer. If you share your photos on Flickr, or another photo sharing site, the photo metadata would be missing the location.
Thank you for this, which has solidified my thinking on keywording.
One thing that is not obvious to me – why keyword location information, when it already exists in the metadata under specific location fields?
Some people like it both ways, or they like to add the “local” names for things as keywords.
Thank you ever so much. I never discovered that little minus sign, and spent hours trying to figure out a way to kill these keywords !
It works very well …
Again thank you very much
One other thing to mention is that sometimes the location on the map isn’t enough to identify the location. For example In Portland, OR there is a well known ball room (the Crystal Ballroom) but in the same building there are a couple other rent-able venues, and at least one pub. Having a Location keyword can allow you to show all the photos you took in that one particular venue.
Thank you very much for this comprehensive and very helpfull suggestions… BTW, I don’t know if this the right place to ask one question re: keywords ? I find myself with tons of totally uselesse keywords added to my photo after transferring them from Aperture to Lightroom. These keywords look like : “Custom Tag – ImageIQ=7783055359” each keyword has its unique number and is related to one single photo. I have a list of several hundreds of such Keywords. I have not found a way to get rid of them other than suppressing them one by one … if I select several of them and delete, it only kills one of them ! Can you tell me how to get rid of several different keywords in one time ? Thank you very much for your help.
In the Keyword List panel, click on the first, hold down Shift and click on the last… and then click the – button at the top of the panel. That should do the trick.
People who are new to tagging their images with keywords would do well to take the suggestions mentioned in this piece. Very well done!
The one point I’ll add is to expand on the point that an advantage of beginning with a controlled vocabulary is that you don’t have to decide on your own structure because that is already provided for you; you only need to add to it or refine it in other ways to your liking. As an example, do you want to include Cuba in the hierarchy indicating that it is in North America, the Caribbean or both? Or that an apple can be a type of fruit tree in one context or a food in another context? In addition to helping you make lots of decisions along those lines, just having a large list of keywords already placed within a hierarchical structure can make getting started relatively simple.
Thanks Mike, and thanks for the extra information too.