Tips for improving my keywording speed?

[danecreekphotography]

I shoot basketball on a regular basis, and submit my images to the team with a full set of keywords on all images. Right now I use a mix of Photo Mechanic and Lightroom for my workflow. The basic workflow is:

1) Ingest using PM (file rename and IPTC stationary applied on import)
2) Initial culling of photos and star rating of selects
3) Lightroom ingest
4) Bulk post-process
5) Apply keywords in LR

I'm applying the keywords in Lightroom using a mix of manually typing them in and using the Keyword Set pane. I have a keyword set with 9 of the 11 players, which is moderately speedy because I can ALT+0-9 to select one of them and it will apply the keyword. Of course it sucks for the two players not in the panel

I can't help but feel like there should be faster ways of doing this within PM, but I can't seem to find one. I'm aware of variable replacement, but that still requires a lot of typing. What I'd like to be able to do is in the full-screen image view press ALT+jersey number and just apply that player's keyword. So ALT+40 would do player #40, ALT+7 would do player 7, etc.

Does this feature exist? If not, what are other people doing for sports where players wear numbers?

Thanks!

Neil

[whistlerdan]

ALT+40 is not really all that much shorter than typing \40\ though ?

[mendozatj]

I shoot Mud Runs with thousands of pictures and have to tag each individually with the bib number.
At first, I would use the number pad to enter the numbers as fast as I could type then hit ALT+> (save, next), type keywords separate by comma, ALT+>
However, since I use a Microsoft ergonomic keyboard on the app I customized the back and forward button to save and move next (ALT+>) and others to copy and paste the keywords.  The apps is called  Microsoft Mouse and Keyboard Center
Hope this helps

[TiggerGTO]

When I was shooting lots of soccer, I came up with a method for dealing with captioning and keywording that was really quick and easy to use.  I created code replacements that were based on both numbers and initials.  Sometimes I could see the player's face but not the jersey number, so I would just use their initials when I couldn't remember the jersey number off the top of my head.  The code replacements also included substitutions for both the caption and the keyword fields.

I would go through the selected photos and enter the number or initials in an unused IPTC field like "Object Name" or "Edit Status".  Using the hot keys to save and jump to the next image, this would go very quickly.  Then I created a Stationery Pad that would have substitutions like this:

Caption: /c{object}/
Keyword: /k{object}/

Based on this information, you can see that for each player I would have keyword substitutions like:

c9    Mia Hamm
cmh   Mia Hamm
k9    name=Mia Hamm,number=9,pos=Forward
kmh   name=Mia Hamm,number=9,pos=Forward

My keywords were structured to make my albums on ExposureManager searchable by name, number or position.

After typing in the numbers or initials in all the pictures, I would apply the stationery pad to all the images, and the Caption and Keyword fields would all be updated to include the appropriate data based on the number or initials from the "Object Name" field.  I'd make one more quick pass through the images watching the Caption and Keyword fields to make sure I didn't mistype a number or initials to something not in the list.

Note: I'm explaining this from memory, so I might not have shown the correct syntax for everything.  But the main point is to explain the three pass method I used to quickly caption and keyword my pictures:

1) go through the pictures and type numbers or initials
2) apply the stationery pad
3) go back through the pictures to verify I didn't mistype any numbers or initials.

Hope this helps,
Danny

p.s. I never actually shot soccer matches where Mia Hamm was playing.  I shot high school and youth league games.