Hierarchical Keywords: Lightroom vs Photo Mechanic

[bill.bane@gmail.com]

This thread is depressing. I (and perhaps millions of LR users) want to dump LR for PM plus. Kirk Baker seems intent on saying "you guys got no problem," and seems to have signed off.

My suggestion/request would be for Kirk (or somebody at Camera Bits) to create a "toy" LR catalog with maybe 20-30 images. Then, like LR users do, start adding some keywords that are meaningful, some flat and at least a few sets of Hierarchical key words. Then take this to PM plus and see what he/she makes of it. Maybe even change/add a keyword, then round trip it back to LR? >> Proof of concept!! Say it loud on a video!

If they do this with the current release, would the PM Keyword list look like the user's LR keyword list? No, not close.

In my case, with my large LR database, many keywords (flat and in hierarchical in LR did not show up in PM+. In LR I saved and saved and saved to the images. Still not in PM+. The keywords in LR that did not show up in PM+ ALL showed up in PS, Bridge, and XnviewMP. What??!! Lots of possible why's I guess, but this stopped me in my tracks, even before this duplication mess PM+ creates.

Camera Bits, please find a way, perhaps even with destructive options, that "make it so" as the great Captain Kirk said. If you did a video with this toy LR database and showed the lightroom Keyword list, then the export to PM+, and its keyword list, this would lay down things firmly and end this discussion. And/or, maybe Camera Bits can give some definitive guidelines telling LR users how to prep their LR keyword list to make this easier/better?

Camera Bits, there are millions of potential customers waiting to see if you hear their cry!  Please try to help me/them more successfully cross this LR/PM+ bridge.

FWIW, I sent this equivalent message to Camera Bits in a support email exchange, and have gotten no reply or comment. Camera Bits appears to be still joined too much at the hip with their traditional customers who do not give a rip about translating a large LR database with complex keyword sets that evolve over time.

[Kirk Baker]

Bill,

I sent you a personal message.  I'd like for you and me to meet up with a screen share and you can show me exactly what you see is wrong.

Thanks,

-Kirk

[bill.bane@gmail.com]

Kirk,

If you sent me a personal message, I did not get it. And, sorry for the delay as some other matters were pressing and I just saw this message.

If the message is within this Camera Bits forum, please tell me where to find it. If you sent an email, please use bill.bane@gmail.com.

Thanks for the response. I really, really want to use your product. Proper porting of large, complex, disorganized lightroom keywords is my necessary first step.

Bill

[carlseibert]

David - Sorry about the untimely reply. I came into this thread on another errand and saw some stuff that was worthy of comment.

Meanwhile I'm looking at ditching the whole hierarchical keywords thing: I'm not sure why I use them other than that's how Lightroom kind of makes you. I'm not sure I need them. I'm not sure why people who use them need them either.

Exactly. There is no such thing as a hierarchical keyword! Keywords are just a bucket of potential search terms. They aren't structured. Even in Lightroom-land, they're just terms and they just get searched. The whole hierarchical construct is just a way of helping us drop the right terms in the bucket on input.

Photo Mechanic's practice of copying the contents of <lr:hierarchicalSubject> into the industry-standard keywords fields is an effort to protect us from data loss in the sadly not-that-unlikely event that some developer writes data there that rightfully should be in the normal fields. Unfortunately, with the advent of AI-based keywording there's nowadays a proliferation of non-standard keywords fields, each one a potential weapon of mass data destruction. Kirk can't save us from all of them, but kudos to him for doing what he can.

 As for migrating from Lightroom to PM+, my previous comments that the ugliness caused by Lightroom's node strings in the keywords is harmless still applies. If a search hits a string, it hits it. Doesn't matter whether the string exists once or a hundred times, the search result remains the same. (In the context of a desktop photo DAM. There are tools that professional librarians can use that do care how many times a term appears in a text. But those are useful only for texts much, much larger than we deal with.)

A common Lightroom hack is to use keywords as labels to make Lightroom's hierarchical keywording interface more like Photo Mechanic's. If such labels are present in the keywords, search in PM+ can hit them and return unwanted results. We can deal with that in PM+ (more on that later) But the thing to keep in mind here is that garbage, if left uncorrected, doesn't corrupt a PM+ dataset any more than it did originally in Lightroom. Lightroom's search function will hit that crap and return the unwanted record just like PM+'s will. If a user didn't feel the need to fix category label corruption in Lightroom, they don't need to fix it once the data is in PM+. They can. But it's up to them.

Now there are way better alternatives (of which PM+ is the "most better", IMHO) to Lightroom. But Lightroom has a huge installed base. We have to keep that in mind. And we have to keep in mind the frailties of XMP and try our best to keep our data safe. 

[carlseibert]

What the entire eff!!!! I didn't know about this. Adobe has just gone off the rails lately. What were they thinking?!!!! Embedded metadata is one of the main points of DNG. They're taking a shotgun to their own standard.

(Of course, now that I think about it, XMP is their standard and they did the same thing there.......)

The real difficulty comes when in the same folder you have the original RAW file, the DNG produced from the RAW file, and an XMP sidecar file which needs to be associated with both image files.  Let's say you want to rename the RAW file and leave the DNG alone.  The XMP sidecar file will be renamed to match the new name of the RAW file and now the DNG loses its metadata.  Worse, let's say you want to delete the RAW file and keep the DNG.  The XMP sidecar file will be deleted with the RAW file and the DNG permanently loses its metadata with no hope of retrieval unless you have a backup.

This is a horrible trend for images that are openly documented and are expected to embed metadata (actually part of the specification!) to later expect XMP sidecar files to be associated with them.  Not only can it cause data loss as I described above, but it can cause data synchronization issues in that the embedded XMP may not match the XMP sidecar file.

Bad idea all around.

-Kirk

[phrank]

@Kirk has anythink chnaged/improved for this in Photo Mechanic+?
I used to work with (iView) Media Pro for Digital Asset Management, but even there I have used "Hierarchical Keywords".
Now I try to do Digital Asset Management in Lightroom, because Medai Pro further development has been discontinued…

[Kirk Baker]

@Kirk has anythink chnaged/improved for this in Photo Mechanic+?

No, no changes in how keywords are handled.

-Kirk

[mastix]

Please create an option to get rid of the hierarchy keywords if we want to. I want to flatten all my hierarchy tags embedded in my images and still have not found any program that can do this in an easy way.

Just an option to flatten, only commas, no more any hierarchy. Tu create hierarchies was the worst decision I have made, cataloging thousands of images. One that I am paying dearly, and it seems I cannot go back.

It should be easy to get rid of them, just make all the separations | signs commas and be done with it. Why is such a simple option not created? I think there are many of us that would love to have all our images have only one level of keywords without all the mess of hierarchies, structured keywords , whatever every different program calls them.....

[dadri]

For the sake of the complete picture (for potential later developments or priority settings), I'd like to answer on this question even if its a bit dated already and even if I don't do image roundtrips between LR & PM, yet:

... the whole hierarchical keywords thing: I'm not sure why I use them other than that's how Lightroom kind of makes you. ... I'm not sure why people who use them need them either.

Actually, Lightroom makes it way to hard to use & manage them, considering how useful they are.

I've never seen anyone using them to group keywords alphabetically, yet.
I use them to build an extensive taxonomy. That way it's less effort to add the complete set of relevant keywords to pictures. I don't have to think about every synonym, upper category, nickname etc. every time.

Building this took and still takes some effort and caution not to add synonyms or hierarchies that won't be valid for every of my photos.

This taxonomy is one of the reasons why after working with PM on location I move my images to my LR catalogue afterwards and exporting any remaining images from there.
And not messing this up at any point is a quite important requirement of mine for every software that needs to touch my raw images/metadata.


A few examples how I use this:

Code: [Select]

Just adding "tactics discussion" to an image results in:
[context: human] > [actions] > talking, speaking, speaks, talk, communication > conversation, conversate > debate > tactics discussion

Adding just "calves" gets me:
[context: human] > [body] > leg > legs > calves, calf

Adding "cups" gets me:
[context: sport], sports > victory, win, triumph > prizes, winnings > trophy > cup > cups, trophies

"QB-sack" results in:
[context: sport], sports > American Football > [events actions situations] > [game scene + action], action, game scene > quarterback sack, QB sack > QB-sack

"player tunnel" results in:
[places locations] > [shops stores POIs] > stadium, arena, sports facility > stadium interior > player tunnel
* Actually the keywords are written in my first language (but often have the semantically correct English translations added). I translated/removed this so everyone here understands them.
** "Cups" and "Calves" also are not ambiguous in my first language, in case you wondered.
*** Brackets indicate keywords that don't get exported/written to final images for publishing. Comma separated keywords indicate that next to the first main keyword further synonyms are added.