If you have been following advice from me and others, you are taking the time to keyword your photos using the Keywording panel, so that you can find them later. Now it is time to organize these keywords.
The Keyword List panel, which is below the Keywording panel, shows you all the keywords you have ever assigned to photos in your catalog. Chances are, at this point it’s just a very long list, sorted alphabetically. You can clean this up by arranging your keywords into nested hierarchies. Here’s an example:
There are three advantages to using keyword hierarchies in Lightroom:
1. It is easier to find a keyword in the list.
2. You can collapse hierarchies in the list, so that they don’t take up space while you aren’t using them (Just click on the downward triangle to hide all keywords within that keyword.)
3. When you assign the bottom-level keyword, all keywords further up in the hierarchy are automatically assigned, thus saving you time. For example, If I assign Victoria to a photo or group of photos, British Columbia, Canada, North America and Location are automatically assigned to the photos.
Here’s how you would set up a hierarchy:
Let’s say that you have keywords for the names of family, friends and clients, as well as some descriptive keywords for people, and you want to organize them as follows:
- To add a new keyword, “People”, click on the + to the left of the words “Keyword List” at the top of the panel, and type People as the Keyword Tag. Click Create. Note that this does not assign the keyword to any photos.
- Right-click on the keyword People, and choose Create New Keyword Inside “People”. Call this one Clients.
- Now click and drag your existing Client names keywords and drop them right on top of Clients, to nest them within Clients.
- Again, Right-click on the keyword People, and choose Create New Keyword Inside “People”. Call this one Family.
- Click and drag your existing Family names keywords and drop them right on top of Family, to nest them within Family.
- etc.
Macro
What hierarchies have you found useful? Leave a comment below!
As I mainly do nature photography I am using it mainly for identifying animals and plants. There are the main groups mammals, butterflies, etc. Next are the families within the groups like psychidae within butterflies and in that family you have the individual species.
For individuals I use the Dutch name as keyword but I also use the synonyms where I enter the scientific name and the German, English and French name.
When I export a photo it will not only add the Dutch keyword but also the group name, the family name and all synonyms.
The keyword list builds up while I photograph and name new species.
Other important thing with the keyword list is to export it once in a while so you won’t lose all in case a corruption occurs. Or if you want to start a new catalog and don’t want to build the keyword list all from scratch again. You can import the list that was exported from the other catalog.
And because the exported list is in plain text (XML), you can edit it in notepad and add several new keywords at once if that works better for you. Just keep to the syntax!
Afterwards you can import the edited list into Lightroom and use all new keywords.
Cheers,
Peter
Great contributions, Peter. Thank you!
Love all your organizing decluttering tips. Better than martha stewart:) hehe.
The Martha Stewart of Digital Photography! Hhmmm… I’m not sure about the connotations of that! :-)
[…] Organize Your Lightroom Keywords into Keyword Hierarchies […]
I was lazy and purchased the keyword hierarchy created by Seth Resnick. While it contains some keywords I have no use for, it is very complete and I feel worth the price (about $100 I think).
Great advice, thank you so much for explaining this. I am currently in the last stages of a 365-photo-project. Since I never thought I’d really make it this far, I was kind of lazy with keywording. I dreaded having to trace and keyword 300+ images in my Lightroom library, but using a hierarchy makes it a lot easier now. A real time saver!
I’m glad it was helpful, Sammy. Congrats on nearing the end of the 365 project!
Having set up a keyword hierarchy, I would agree with the first 2 advantages. However if I want to use them as captions on a web page, advantage 3 becomes a disadvantage. Is there any way I can just use the ‘leaf’ without the twigs and branches for the caption? If not can I at least keep the structure of branch twig leaf, at the moment they get sorted alphabetically, so I can end up with, twig leaf branch, which makes a nonsense of the caption.