Ideas on Keywording

[theorib]

Kirk,

I know there have been quite a lot of treads over the theeme of developing a better keyword system.
I quickly browsed through them and haven't found consistent information on what are you planing.
I know you guys are great developers but it never hurts to give some input and advice that comes from experience:

Keywording is an art and it's painfull. Anything that makes it easier, gives us more time to have fun around when we are not keywording...

I would like to suggest a few things for the keywording system I Imagine you may have already developed at this time:


Being able to create a hierarchy:

I don't know if you have seen Aperture or Lightroom keywording system but they share on great things in common: you can create a hierarchy of keywords in which only the last word of the branch is applied. That way, you can create a thoughtful system to use for all your images, for example:

Picture Style
   Color
      Black and White
      Color
      Sepia
   Orientation
      Vertical
      Horizontal
      Square
      Panoramic
   People
      Nobody
      People
      Man Only
      Boy
      Girl
...

Subject
   Activity
      Climbing
      Hiking
      looking
   Objects
      Backpack
      Shoe
Concept
   Happiness
   Risk
   Agriculture
........

Well, this way one can follow a self-created logical sequence while keywording and end up with properly keyworded pictures in all aspects.
Only the last word on the branch should be applied because if one creates a category like Picture Style:Color:Black and White one would have the undesired words "Picture Style" and "Color" in a Black and White image. It is desirable that things stay in alphabetical order but if you can manually sort the categories (the ones that contain the keywords themselves) things get easier.


The second important thing (which isn't essential but is more than great) is being able to create and setup a thesaurus dictionary for your keywords so when you apply for example the word "Climbing" it contains (applies) other words like Mountaineering, Sports, Action, etc.


The third important thing is one that Photomechanic already has.Being able to import and export keywords. For a more complex system like this one, it would be desirable to be able to export as a tab delimited text file (used by Aperture and Lightroom) and as XML (used by Adobe Bridge)


The last but not least functionality is drag and drop capability so one can select a few keywords and just drag them to an image or to the keyword field that belongs to tha image in the IPTC panel or whatever.


I think is not a very simple matter to have categories and a Thesaurus at the same time but if you like this idea, I can definitely come up with ideas and help. A good and easy star would be in a keyword tree such as the one I described, one can be able to create categories or keywords.

This way you can create something like this:

Subject (Category)
   Activity (Category)
      Sports (Keyword)
         Mountaineering (Keyword)
            Climbing (Keyword)
               Rock Climbing (Keyword)
               Ice Climbing (Keyword)

That way, when you put "Rock Climbing", the file comes up with "Climbing", "Mountaineering" and "Sports" but not with "Activity and Subject". Whe should be able to create as many Categories/child-categories and keywords as we would like...
 
This is not exactly a thesaurus but its simpler than organizing one and I would say would be a great system to work with for most people.

One last thing: One should be able to close all the tree branches or just the ones he wants so he can see just a handfull of categories or the one he is working with.

Why just a hierarchical keywording system (one which adds all names in the hierarchy when the las word of the branch is selected) not desirable? Because if one is really serious about keywording, he would start with already too many words in his screen and that makes it really difficult or time consuming to properly keyword pictures.

Well, thanks for your patience on reading all this and I hope you consider this ideas if you haven't already come up with them on your own.

Best,

Theo Ribeiro

[Kirk Baker]

Theo,

I won't try and quote everything you said, but I will explain what we are working on.

We are adding a Structured Keywords editor (Hierarchical Keywords) that is a floating panel that can be used outside of the IPTC dialogs to directly bulk apply keywords to your photos.

It can directly import David Riecks' Controlled Vocabulary tab delimited text file.  It is Unicode based and can handle text from any language.

You can certainly create thesaurus-like entries.  Categories (non included parts of the tree) are delimited by [ and ] for example

[Subject]
(tab)[Activity]
(tab)(tab)Climbing
(tab)(tab)Hiking

The [ and ] characters are not visible, but the text is drawn in bold when it is a category and in plain text when it is a keyword.
Category terms are not considered to be keywords and are not included in the hierarchical path applied to the keywords in photos.
You can apply just single keywords or you can apply the entire path to the selected keyword.  You can edit the path before it is applied if you want.

All items are alphabetically sorted in each level of the tree.

The interface is a column browser which is more efficient than tree views.  You don't need to collapse and expand by clicking on tiny triangles or '+' boxes.  If you've experienced the Column view in the Mac OS X Finder then this will seem very familiar.

You can edit keywords using the built-in editor, and/or you can edit text files and import their hierarchies. 

Import does a merge and only adds new items so it is easy to keep a master list and keep on updating and importing it, knowing that you won't lose anything and you won't have duplicates.

It has a Find interface that makes it very easy to find keywords.  Next matches are easy to scan through.

It has no drag and drop interface.  You just select your photos and then double-click keywords in the floating panel.  It is quite efficient.

The Mac OS X version of this is nearly complete.  The Windows version is behind somewhat, because there is no column view browser available on the Windows platform so we have to write our own.

Thanks for the feedback.

I hope this explains things a little more effectively than trying to piece together bits of info from various threads on the forums.

-Kirk