Fixing keywords messed up by Lightroom

[carlseibert]

graham1 (as he is known here) has worked out a clever way to deal with the trash that gets injected into the keywords field as a result of Lightroom's crazy way of treating keywords that are entered hierarchically.

He kindly shared it in comments over on my blog and I wrote a sidebar post about his method. I attempted to add some clarity to this murky subject. Whether I succeeded or not is an open question.

Anybody who's interested can visit my post here: https://www.carlseibert.com/clean-up-lightroom-keywords-in-photo-mechanic/

(Note that this post won't appear at the top of the blog or in the recent posts widget. I set the publication date so that it would sort in the indexes next to the post to which it's a sidebar.)

[Dub]

Hello Carl,

Great idea, and great article, except in my case I prefer to keep the hierarchical keywords and remove the flat keywords!!!

Personally, I have definitely solved this problem by not using Lightroom anymore!!!
PM6+ with CameraRaw/Photoshop and all is well...

Simplicity and efficiency...

(I will create a link, on my site, to your excellent blog)

 

[carlseibert]

Thank you, Dub.

For heaven sakes, just please make sure you have your keywords in the standard fields! You don't want to lose your data if you migrate DAMs or send pictures to someone who uses a different DAM.

Most DAMs (PM+ included) will return an asset if there's a matching string somewhere in a keyword. So, "... ,search term | another search term, ..." should return for a search on "term".  In those cases, leaving the keywords "hierarchical" would work OK.

But some DAMs only match a whole keyword, which would be whatever is between the delimiters, usually commas. In such a case, you'd have to search for "search term | another search term" to return that asset.  Which is probably not what you want. You never know how the next piece of software will behave.

And yeah, I don't use Lightroom anymore, either. That central database containing all the edits creeps me out. What's more, I just feel like PM > ON1 RAW (or Photoshop)> Photo Mechanic (Plus) gives me better functionality all the way through.

[Dub]

But some DAMs only match a whole keyword, which would be whatever is between the delimiters, usually commas. In such a case, you'd have to search for "search term | another search term" to return that asset.  Which is probably not what you want. You never know how the next piece of software will behave.

It will be always time, then, to use the "graham1 method" ... 

Hierarchical keywords are really too convenient in the PM+ catalog not to use them...