Keyword separator

[Woodie]

I've been evaluating PM and thought I had finally found software that understood heirarchical keywords.  But, PM only seems to understand half the issue.  The controlled vocabulary allows parent-child relationships but doesn't write the terms out in that relationship.  Has the issue of the heirarchical word separator been addressed?  I saw a post from last November addressing this.

Here is what I mean.  In Controlled Vocabulary a parent might be Animals and a child Dogs.  However, when Dogs is selected from the list, Animals, Dogs is entered into the keyword field.  This is no different than entering two keywords Animals and Dogs.  It does not retain the heirarchy.  Maybe this example would help.

Animals
    Dogs
People
    John

I have an image with John and his dog so I select John from the controlled vocabulary and Dogs.  The entry in the keywords field is Animals, Dogs, People, John.  The heirarchy is not maintained.  It's just four separate keywords.  When I import into iMatch, four categories are created rather than two with child categories.  My limited experience with Lightroom also indicates four separate keywords rather than a heirarchy also.

I don't know what would work for others, but I need something like Animals.Dogs, People.John.  This indicates two Parent.Child relationships.

I thought a workaround would be to add a period after the parent in my controlled vocabulary file.  This does not work because PM automatically puts a comma between terms in the controlled vocabulary so I get Animals.,Dogs,People.,John.

Am I missing something?  Is there a way to set a period (other character) as the heirarchy seperator and a comma (or other character) as the keyword seperator?

As I said, I've just downloaded for evaluation so I may be missing a setting somewhere.

Thanks for any help.

[Kirk Baker]

I've been evaluating PM and thought I had finally found software that understood heirarchical keywords.  But, PM only seems to understand half the issue.  The controlled vocabulary allows parent-child relationships but doesn't write the terms out in that relationship.  Has the issue of the heirarchical word separator been addressed?  I saw a post from last November addressing this.

Here is what I mean.  In Controlled Vocabulary a parent might be Animals and a child Dogs.  However, when Dogs is selected from the list, Animals, Dogs is entered into the keyword field.  This is no different than entering two keywords Animals and Dogs.  It does not retain the heirarchy.  Maybe this example would help.

Animals
    Dogs
People
    John

I have an image with John and his dog so I select John from the controlled vocabulary and Dogs.  The entry in the keywords field is Animals, Dogs, People, John.  The heirarchy is not maintained.  It's just four separate keywords.  When I import into iMatch, four categories are created rather than two with child categories.  My limited experience with Lightroom also indicates four separate keywords rather than a heirarchy also.

I don't know what would work for others, but I need something like Animals.Dogs, People.John.  This indicates two Parent.Child relationships.

I thought a workaround would be to add a period after the parent in my controlled vocabulary file.  This does not work because PM automatically puts a comma between terms in the controlled vocabulary so I get Animals.,Dogs,People.,John.

Am I missing something?  Is there a way to set a period (other character) as the heirarchy seperator and a comma (or other character) as the keyword seperator?

As I said, I've just downloaded for evaluation so I may be missing a setting somewhere.

You're not missing anything.  The current IPTC (and XMP) way of storing keywords is just an unordered list.  It always has been that way.  You could try and artificially add some periods (or other character of your choosing) between two keywords which would cause them to be represented as a single list item in the metadata, but currently this would have to be done manually in the Keywords field.

If you're scripting IMatch, maybe you could find terms that end with a period and concatenate the following term during the import.

-Kirk

[Woodie]

Thank you Kirk for your quick response.  I didn't think about IPTC and XMP not using heirarchical keywording.  Perhaps Adobe will be rethinking the XMP standard since Lightroom, at least the new version, does recognize parent.child relationships.  Anyway, I may have found a workaround.  I'm experimenting with using Search and Replace to replace (using the example from the first post) Animals, Dogs, People, John with Animals.Dogs, People.John.  It's an extra step but may be a solution.  It doesn't deal with lastname, firstname but I sometimes use lastname_firstname to get around that limitation in some applications.  I really want to set this up before importing to iMatch so that it imports directly into the correct catergories.

I want to add that PM seems to work with NEF files better than the most third-party apps I've tried.

Thanks again.