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Keyword Hierarchy - adding to existing

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Steve Chasey

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You can drag and drop existing keywords to create a hierarchy where none exists before, but it's not very a very reliable method as half the time you just end up highlighting a fist full of other keywords above/below the target and have to abandon the attempt.

Is there a simpler method of doing it? No hidden key stoke combos in Victoria's list I've found. I've got a massive list of keywords which really needs to be consolidated into some form of hierachy, so I'd be grateful for any ideas or solutions.

Thanks
 
No, it is all about dragging-and-dropping.

I am not sure if you are referring to a technical problem of actually "grabbing" the correct keyword to drag-and-drop or something else.
It would be useful to clarify...

Tony Jay
 
I have hundreds of keywords - want to sort them into appropriate hierarchies to make managing them easier. I have found that you can drag and drop individual keywords onto other existing keywords to form a hierarchy but that the process isn't without problems - hence reference to ending up highlighting fistful of existing keywords when I'm trying to drag a keyword up/down the list to drop it onto another to create/extend a hierarchy. So not trying to grab a keyword to add to an image.
 
Geez, I just can't reproduce any behavior like that. You do need to expand a hierarchy by clicking the triangle, but I can only ever get one keyword to highlight. Maybe some issue with interaction betwixt system, mouse, and Lr on your particular machine?
 
Buying an hierarchy set isn't going to solve my problem. I've traveled the world, so I've got more places, buildings, streets than you can shake a stick at in my list of keywords. Hence the need to get them into hierarchies to make them more manageable. My library has over 44,000 images in it, so I really do need to find a solution!
 
Buying an hierarchy set isn't going to solve my problem. I've traveled the world, so I've got more places, buildings, streets than you can shake a stick at in my list of keywords. Hence the need to get them into hierarchies to make them more manageable. My library has over 44,000 images in it, so I really do need to find a solution!
Have you even downloaded the trial of one of these vocabularies?
 
I had a look at the link you provided Phil. Great for generics or someone with a small list of keywords but no help here as I'd still need to move existing keywords in the list to nest with other keywords to create hierarchies appropriate to my library.
 
I completely agree with Steve that a generic keyword hierarchy is the not the way to go.
What keyword hierarchies are important and their granularity (depth of detail) need to be individualised and so a generic hierarchy becomes irrelevant pretty quickly apart from giving one a basic idea of how to proceed.

My suggestion is a divide-and-conquer approach.
Given your second post I assume that location forms an important part of your keywording effort.
Create an non-exportable keyword "WORLD LOCATION", it is capitalised to emphasise that it is non-exportable.
Find all the keywords that correspond to places and put them into WORLD LOCATION. Do the same for keywords in other categories, such as ANIMALS, EVENTS, etc.
Once the keywords are grouped according to their base characteristics find the next level of organisation - this is where the research I spoke of earlier comes into play. With WORLD LOCATION for example the next level is "island" and "continent", under continent comes "Africa", "Australia", "Asia", Antartica", "Europe" etc. Under each continent comes individual countries as appropriate. Depending on where I have actually been to photograph the level of detail is still only at that level or it eventually devolves down to street addresses.

There is no magic bullet solution for you Steve - it will involve a lot of pulling and pushing of keywords to wrangle them into their appropriate positions in various hierarchies.

Tony Jay
 
I completely agree with Steve that a generic keyword hierarchy is the not the way to go.
What keyword hierarchies are important and their granularity (depth of detail) need to be individualised and so a generic hierarchy becomes irrelevant pretty quickly apart from giving one a basic idea of how to proceed.

My suggestion is a divide-and-conquer approach.
Given your second post I assume that location forms an important part of your keywording effort.
Create an non-exportable keyword "WORLD LOCATION", it is capitalised to emphasise that it is non-exportable.
Find all the keywords that correspond to places and put them into WORLD LOCATION. Do the same for keywords in other categories, such as ANIMALS, EVENTS, etc.
Once the keywords are grouped according to their base characteristics find the next level of organisation - this is where the research I spoke of earlier comes into play. With WORLD LOCATION for example the next level is "island" and "continent", under continent comes "Africa", "Australia", "Asia", Antartica", "Europe" etc. Under each continent comes individual countries as appropriate. Depending on where I have actually been to photograph the level of detail is still only at that level or it eventually devolves down to street addresses.

There is no magic bullet solution for you Steve - it will involve a lot of pulling and pushing of keywords to wrangle them into their appropriate positions in various hierarchies.

Tony Jay
Tony,

Should we start a new thread on the topic of how people organize their keyword hierarchies?

Phil
 
OK, so no hidden solution, just persistence so far as existing keywords are concerned. I can manage to nest half a dozen before the multiple highlights problem becomes uniform, so looks like I'm in for the long haul :(

Grateful if this could be added to the user wish list for next set of tweaks to Lightroom. Would be great to right click on a keyword and have the option to nest it with an existing item which is higher up the hierarchy. The coding shouldn't be too difficult to sort out compared to other facets of Lightroom that have been changed over the years.
 
There's no easy way to rebuild the structure. Tips though.... Use temporary parent keywords to gather some children rather than trying to drag a bunch of children long distances up or down the panel. Also make use of the filter box at the panel's top.

Personally, I am not a big fan of keyword hierarchies. OK with data that is already structured, but it's too easy to spend too much time setting up the hierarchy and then keeping it from slowly degrading (eg when you import files with flattened keywords etc). That time could be well spent tagging photos with keywords and other metadata, or creating metadata presets and keyword sets to make it easier to add more keywords to photos. So I have a few hierarchies in my keyword list, almost all created when I had a very specific need - so an ad hoc rather than one long haul.

John
 
The Controlled Vocabulary keyword list has a long and respectable history in the DAM world. Other good keyword lists tend to be subject-driven - species, car models etc
 
Thanks for the tip John. My key words list is v long - built up over 5 versions of LR! By volume, my library is travel related, over 5 continents, using 10 different digi bodies and about the same no of film bodies plus circa 40 lenses, of which perhaps 2/3 still in active use.
 
So is my keyword list, Steve, built up after all 6 versions and originating in iView MediaPro and first in Extensis Portfolio.

I'm not sure why you mention film bodies and lenses, but I am assuming you're adding those details as keywords? I have pre-digital photos too, but I update their EXIF so I can see that info in the Metadata panel and so the Library Filter's columns can find these pictures in the correct columns. I use my CaptureTime to Exif plugin to do this, but there are other EXIF editing tools.

With travel, I can also count 5 continents, just. I do add keywords for locations, but I focus on the standard IPTC location fields - Country / State / City / Location - which show in the Metadata panel and Library Filter's columns. It's the same philosophy of concentrating on adding as much relevant metadata as possible, and not caring much about keyword hierarchy.

On Windows, one issue can force one to add some hierarchy. Adobe have never fixed a bug that means only about 1600 keywords can be displayed at a single level. So if you have 2000 keywords in a flat list, you won't be able to scroll down to the final 400. If that happened on Mac, you can imagine the screams.

John
 
I include all the camera equipment info as part of the keywords attached to any given image.

My current digi bodies have geo taggers (3 external, 1 internal), so my embedded metadata covers most of the location info without specifically using the IPTC fields but that's not completely accurate as sub location is dependent on someone defining the area to follow parish type boundaries, rather than a wider area conveniently labelled with one of its constituent sub locations which seems to be the norm . So I stick with keywords to properly locate and identify the image -it's also easier if the collection includes scanned film images as these are more spread out geographically and using the IPTC field would be very long winded if going down to location level
 
Steve,

I disagree. I use Jeffrey Friedl gettagging plugin. I define in Google earth in a KLM file areas and provide the name. Such as "Lake" which is where my parents live. Or Normandy, or whatever logical name for the geographic area. Works great, and then populates the IPTC location fields. This has allowed me to eliminate a lot of keywords.
 
I use Jeffrey Friedl gettagging plugin.
Another vote for the Geoencoding plug-in. I don't have any camera geo-taggers or GPS tracking set up so I use this (via its integration with Google Earth) to set up all co-ordinate, timezone and location information. It also now has some support for the newer Location Created and Location Shown field sets. The interface is a bit quirky but it's a very powerful tool.

If you already have GPS location data you can still use the plug-in to look up and populate the location fields.
 
Had a quick look at the plug-in. Won't help me with clearing up my issue I sort help for and my taggers do all I need them to do to confirm where the shot was taken.

Issue with accuracy isn't necessarily at point embedded, more when viewed. Seems Google Earth doesn't have the look up tables covering all sub-location, so it reports nearest approximation.
 
Had a quick look at the plug-in. Won't help me with clearing up my issue I sort help for and my taggers do all I need them to do to confirm where the shot was taken.

Issue with accuracy isn't necessarily at point embedded, more when viewed. Seems Google Earth doesn't have the look up tables covering all sub-location, so it reports nearest approximation.
Does anyone work with geosetter? I read on another forum that it has excellent look up tables for detailed locations.

Phil

[Edited to remove accidental dodgy link]
 
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Boy, this thread has wandered all over.

I never saw a post with more details or a screen shot of the multiple highlight problem, so I guess that got sorted?
 
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