A further look at Keywords within Lightroom

One of the most tedious tasks with maintaining a large catalog of images is maintaining the list of keywords and applying the right keywords to an image. Following on from the great tutorials of my fellow Nut, Michael Hoffman (Tag your images), I’d like to show you how to create and maintain more complex keyword tables.

For example, the image below is of a sunrise on the Isle of Skye in Scotland, UK, Europe.

so adding the location based keywords of ‘Skye’, ‘Isle of Skye’, ‘Scotland’, ‘UK’ & ‘Europe’ would have to be added individually using the normal methods within Lightroom. This can get very tedious and is prone to many errors such as ‘Isle of Sky’.

With a little fore thought and preparation the job of creating a nested or hierarchical group of keywords can make tagging your images much simpler. In this example, I will be able to add just the keyword of Skye and have the ‘Isle of Skye’, ‘Scotland’, ‘UK’ & ‘Europe’ added automatically. This is able to work because ‘Skye’ and ‘Isle of Skye’ are two names to describe the same thing and ‘Skye’ is within ‘Scotland’, which is within the ‘UK’ etc.

Creating a nested keyword structure in Lightroom is easy enough as can be seen at the beginning of Michael’s tutorial, although Lightroom does make this quite tedious when trying to input and organise complex nested keywords.

As you can see in the screenshot above, I have already created a basic nested keyword structure. Creating a large nest list like this is very time consuming, so I prefer to use the following method.

Lightroom maintains the list of keywords in a structured text file. it is possible to export and import these keywords and then edit them with a simple text editor.

Clicking on the Metadata tab from the menu, scroll down and click the Export Keywords..

 

Save the keywords text file and open it within your favourite text editor..

 

 

As you can see, the text file contains the keywords from our catalog. The keywords are nested using the ‘Tab’ key.. so in the example above Shanghai and Beijing are part of China, which is in turn part of Asia.

So now we can create more entries within the keyword file, using tabs to sort the hierarchy of the table.

Once the changes have been made, save the file as a .txt file format and import it back into Lighroom.

The file that has just been edited and you should now see the added keywords appear in your keyword list.

So having added a nested structure of keywords, how do we make it so that ‘Skye’ and ‘Isle of Skye’ are treated the same within LR? The answer is Synonyms, LR allows each keyword to have other names. This can be accessed by right clicking (or cmd click for macs) on a keyword and clicking on the option Edit Keyword Tag.

By doing this, typing either Devon or Devonshire will tag the image with BOTH tags. To do this in the text editor we need to add the synonym using the { and } brackets as seen below

Save the text file and import back into Lightroom as per the instructions above.

Lightroom keywords should now look like this.

and now to the Magic, we will know add a single keyword to an image and all the nested parents will also be tagged.

I hope you have found this useful and although the initial setup is a little time consuming, editing the txt file and creating nested keyword tags goes a long way towards maintaining a clean effective image database.

two further little notes before I finish.

(1) using the [ and ] brackets creates a keyword that does not export

and (2) importing keywords adds to the list that LR already has, rather than overwriting the existing keywords.

NB! it is always wise to back up your catalog before making large scale changes to your image database.