Keywording

[DueyDooDah]

So, how are you doing on your keywording? (If you don't know what I'm talking about, then you probably are not using a photo organizing tools)

I have attempted to decipher numerous discussions/articles/blogs/etc. to find a proper, long-term solution to organize the thousands of photos I and my wife have taken. I have a workable set of keywords and collections (well, not yet collections, but I am trying) but can't help feel I could do better.

From one discussion, it looks like you should use collections for those items that are not photo specific (such as family members, names of people, etc.) and all other items should be keywords (such as places, breeds of animals, etc.) The way I understand it, if you send a photo to someone along with the metadata, the keywords should be recognizable and understandable by anyone. So, if you send an image of a dog to a magazine publisher, the metadata could contain the keywords 'dog', 'animal', 'pet', etc. but should not contain 'Fido', which should be in a collection.

Now I understand that this makes sense if one is a professional, but is it also true for us non-professionals?

Also, how does this fit into a Disney character scheme? If Disney characters are recognizable by nearly everyone, should the names be included in keywording or should they, as they are similar to the 'Fido' scenerio above, placed into a collection?

How have those of you that are disciplined in your practices handling your organization? I don't feel a full Digital Asset Management solution is necessary but it makes sense to have a standard set of heirarchical keywords available so that, not only do people not have to reinvent the wheel, but they all have a basis to start their library of photos to minimize the work later, when their libraries grow. Someone mentioned that Adobe should take the lead on this and work to create a standard set of words, which I don't disagree with. But what do we do in the meantime?

Those of you that have a large number of photos may also be struggling with this. It was an issue in the film days also, but on a bigger scale. I inherited my family photos from my father after he passed. Now I have a huge collection of memories that I cannot make now sense of as he didn't mark many photos with a description. Who is that person standing with my mom? Which waterfall are they standing in front of? What was that pet's name? (When looking at these questions, I wonder if keywords SHOULD contain proper names. Collections do not get passed along as metadata so cannot be used to pass personal information along to descendants. A good argument to counter the use of Collections, above?)

Chime in. Give us your thoughts and/or practices. Does your solution seem to be working? Do you think it will stand the test of time? Would you consider sharing your master list? Do you use collections? Do you use synonyms (I have NOT gotten here yet)?

 

[ukcatfan]

If you are doing this for your use, then use words that you would likely need to search by. Who cares what professionals or anyone else thinks. I always include names instead of generic words. I have three daughters. If I wanted to find shots of only one of them, it would be frustrating to only be able to search by the word daughter.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

I've never read anything on how things should be done, so I can only say what I like to do.

First, I use collections to group like sets of pictures. So I have collections for things like vacations, portrait shoots, macro shoots, club shoots, etc. They are organized in collection hierarchies. One caution is that the picked/rejected setting is collection specific. If you pick some shots and then move them to a collection, the pickedness won't follow with them. To get around that, I resort to gimmicks like filtering to just my picks, marking them with a color, going to the collection and pulling up just that color, and then marking them all as picks.

For keywords, I add them with two goals in mind. First, I want to be able to pull together all of my pictures that meet some criteria (all shots of my kids on beaches with boogie boards). Second, when looking at a picture, I want to know who and what was in it.

I have several major categories that I use for keywords - locations, people, animals, plants, objects, and activities. Each major category is it's own hierarchy and none is marked for export.

The location hierarchy heavily overlaps two other pieces of metadata - the ITPC location tag and the lat/log geotag. I like the flexibility of having my own location hierarchy. So I have my pool, which is a subset house as a subset of my neighborhood, which is a subset of my town, which is a subset state, which is a subset of my country. For disney, a location might be Astro Orbiter in Tomorrowland, in Magic Kingdom, in Walt Disney World, in Florida, in The United States.

For people, I categorize people as friends, family, neighbors, coworkers, generics, and celebrities. Family is grouped into three groups -immediate family (me, wife, kids), wife's family, and my family (parents, siblings, and spouses/children of siblings). Generics include things like fireman, policeman, etc. Celebrities are specific people that aren't in another group. They include people like Disney characters.

The problem I have with Lightroom and people is that it doesn't handle sharing well. With iMatch, I could define someone as part of my coworker hierarchy, my friend hierarchy, and my neighbor hierarchy. A single assignement of that person would cover all three categories. With Lightroom, I can duplicate the keyword in different areas, but I can't "share" it.

For Animals and Plants, I make things as specific as I feel like it. I could do the whole phylum, species, whatever business, but that's way too much work for me. Instead, I just have broad categories like mammals that break down into specific species. Occasionally I'll throw in another grouping like sea mammals.

Plants often get categorized simply as "flower" because I'm just not that inclined to research every particular flower I shoot.

Activities is where I capture things like canoeing, skating, etc.

Objects is a catch all. It's a very flat and large dimension. It includes what you would expect - things like camera (broken down by brand and model), food, and pool. It also includes things like terrain features (mountains, lakes, rivers). It has several sub-hierarchies like (vehicle, ground vehicle, minivan, Honda Odyssey).

Aside from the inability to share members (which really irritates me), my biggest concern about keywording is that the return on investment seems so low. Because of that, I'm sporadic about doing it. Because of that, the value diminishes even further. I recently tried a website that searches for faces and auto-catalogs them. Sadly, it was extreme inaccurate, especially getting similar looking family members mixed up.

My recommendation to someone getting start keywording for personal use is to keep it simple enough that you won't mind doing it. Personally, I find that identifying people (and their relationship to you) is the top priority. Locations can be handled well enough through geotagging. For the rest, I'd most worry about just keywording major stuff.

For geotagging, I recently bought a new GPS specifically designed for the task. It uses rechargeable AA batteries and can go 20 hours on a charge. It's small, light, and clips to my belt. I just fire it up when I start out on a shoot and don't think about it until I get home and sync it up.

 

[Groucho]

Lightroom has been the key (no pun intended) for me to finally start keywording my photos properly. It's the first one I've found that actually seems to take keywording seriously and has a proper interface for it (though it still has a few annoyances, the biggest one for me is that when you add a new keywork, the sideway then scrolls up to highlight the working folder, so you have to scroll back down to use the keyword you just created!)

I have my keywords grouped together, and some groups have parent keyword exported and some don't. For example, I have a "family" group, but I don't want "family" to be a keyword, so only the actual person's name is added when it's exported. Similarly, the "places" group is not exported, but everything underneath it is. From their, it's pretty straightforward hierarchy. For example, if I'm putting in some fireworks photos, I would add my "Illuminations" keyword and that will include all the parent items except "places" - so Orlando, Disney World, and Epcot. I have a top-level keyword for "fireworks" so I may add that too (but I sometimes overlook it), and will also add any family/friend keywords for people in the photo. I also have higher-level Disney World ones for just "monorail" and "parade", but most everything else is under the proper park or hotel.

When importing photos, the first thing I do is add keyword to every photo, even the ones that are obviously junk. For Disney shots, this usually involves a quick once-over to tag everything "Epcot" or "Beach Club" or whatever (since these will be very easy and quick to do), then I go through again one-by-one and add specific tags like people's name, the name of specific attractions or restaurants, etc. Then I go through and post-process everything. Photos that I'll put on my web site I put a red label on, and photos that I'll put in the "family-only" section I'll put a yellow label on. When I'm done with a folder, I'll highlight the reds, export just those with a custom filename and make sure the numbering is correct, then do the same for the yellows. I then export everything with the original filename and that'll be the ones that I can view quickly later. Once I'm done with the trip, I'll make a new collection (as Lightroom calls them) for the trip, with all the red-tagged photos, and another with the yellow-tagged photos, both for the whole length of the trip.

Obviously you can make the keywords as detailed as you'd like. WDW and DL are the only ones where I get really specific, the rest of the time I'm mainly concerned about the people in the photo and the general location or event name. I do have a bunch of keywords set up for car photos, though.

As for proper names vs generics - well, most of my public photos only have my son and rarely me and/or my wife in them - frankly, I couldn't care less if anyone knows our first names. (Jack's my kid, Cathy's my wife, Jeff's me.) Other photos generally go in a family-only section on my web site, and again, it's first names only and I don't think anyone cares.

If you are concerned about privacy or appearance, then like Mark does, you can mark your proper name keywords to not export, so you can still reference them inside the program but they won't appear on any shared jpgs.

I just hope that in the future, if a better keywording program comes along, it'll have the ability to import Lightroom metadata - I hate the idea that I have so much work tied into one program!

 

[mabas9395]

I also use lightroom and it is a great program for organizing photos into folders, tagging, developing and uploading to Smugmug. But I often get so far behind in my photos, that I've lost track of which set I've tagged, which ones have been developed, etc.

So what I started doing is that during my import, every single photo gets tagged with "To Tag", "To Develop", "To Smugmug", and "To Folderize". These are my "To Do" keywords. After I've completed a particular task I remove that keyword. That way, when I have some free time (this week if I'm luck) I can sit down to lightroom and easily pull up the photos that I haven't organized yet (which is also my de-junking process) or which ones I haven't tagged all the way, etc.

This has helped me a lot in keeping my organizational process more organized.

 

[jann1033]

If you are doing this for your use, then use words that you would likely need to search by. Who cares what professionals or anyone else thinks. I always include names instead of generic words. I have three daughters. If I wanted to find shots of only one of them, it would be frustrating to only be able to search by the word daughter.

let this day go down in history... for once i agree totally with ukcatfan
who cares what someone else thinks is the "correct way" if you are just using them for yourself. i use whatever is most likely to be used/remembered by me ie i have a lot of floral photos, so i have them keyworded by type, where i took them and when and color..i like the way lightroom 2 suggests likely keywords and so sometimes apply them as well ( ie plants for flowers) depending on if i think i would ever connect them to the photo i want to find

 

[boBQuincy]

BreezeBrowser has a decent interface for keywording. I did some last night, with this strategy:

first pass was a theme park: Animal Kingdom
second pass was a show or area: Kilimanjaro safari
third pass was names of people or animals: Elelphants
etc, until it is keyworded to a level where I feel I can find any certain photo.

 

[ukcatfan]

let this day go down in history... for once i agree totally with ukcatfan

You are from Ohio and I am from Kentucky. It is a completely normal and healthy rivalry Oh, BTW... I grew up in Ashland, which has its biggest football rivalry with Ironton, OH.

 

[DueyDooDah]

.... Who cares what professionals or anyone else thinks. I always include names instead of generic words...

The reason I care is that if there is some "better way" of maintaining a keyword list, one that I seldom have to adjust, then I'd like to go that way. I hate reinventing a round wheel (I'm lazy by nature, which dooms me to the role of a perfectionist/procrastinator) and practice has shown me that if left to my own devices, I will be messing with keywords until the cows come home (I don't know what that means, but I've heard it all my life, so I stole it). It would be nice to NOT have to add upper levels of the hierarchy. If thought out properly, I assume this will help.

...I have several major categories that I use for keywords - locations, people, animals, plants, objects, and activities. Each major category is it's own hierarchy and none is marked for export.

The location hierarchy heavily overlaps two other pieces of metadata - the ITPC location tag and the lat/log geotag...

...For Animals and Plants, I make things as specific as I feel like it. I could do the whole phylum, species, whatever business, but that's way too much work for me. Instead, I just have broad categories like mammals that break down into specific species. Occasionally I'll throw in another grouping like sea mammals...

I have similar major categories although I do not duplicate the IPTC info. I don't follow the standards for Location in the IPTC data and fill in my own criteria. For now, it's based on some specific detail that helps me know the nearest landmark the the scene. Not having a geo-tagging device, I have not gone there yet.

As for animals/plants, this is a difficult one for me. As you mention, you can go into great detail but the return on investment may not be there. I have found that I need more than a very general level of category but I also do not need science to "help" me. I'd never remember the species name anyway. I need somewhere in between but have not figured out a good level yet. I also seem to be using different levels for similar categories. E.g., I have alot of bird photos but some I leave as bird, some I'll go to Duck, but I have not gone to the type of Duck. But, when I specify Peguins, I may go a level deeper to distinguish an Emperor from an Adelie. Not to mention that common names do not carry over to different regions.

...I have my keywords grouped together, and some groups have parent keyword exported and some don't. For example, I have a "family" group, but I don't want "family" to be a keyword, so only the actual person's name is added when it's exported...

I have not used the "Do not Export" feature for keywords. This is an interesting thought. Can you help me understand your reasoning for using this feature? It may help others, including me, to know why they would want to use it? Right now, with little thought involved, I can't see the use of it, although there may be a very good reason to do so. I, for one, would like the ability to find "family" members (using your example) using that keyword but there may be better ways.

...So what I started doing is that during my import, every single photo gets tagged with "To Tag", "To Develop", "To Smugmug", and "To Folderize"...

Brilliant. I may use this.

Thanks everyone for participating in this thread. I was unsure if it would generate discussion as it's a weird subject. I'm happy to be learning more from you people.

 

[alan]

Great topic.

Fundamentally, I do not buy into what I believe to be the Lightroom / Adobe model. Information about photographs should not be stored in some random database file somewhere. Real life happens, and in that you are giong to rename, or copy, or move the photograph files. And if that means that the metadata no longer applies to the pictures, that plain sucks.

No, the place for metadata about a photograph is in the photograph itself (although see the footnote below).

That leaves the EXIF and IPTC fields. But there's a problem there, too. IPTC does not support hierarchical data. So, in an ideal world you might want to filter the pictures in the way that Mark suggests: show me everything taken in the USA. Now drill down to my state. Then to my town, etc.

So far, the best tool that I have found - though still terribly incomplete - is the Windows Live Photo Gallery from the Borg. They have implemented a hierarchical structure on IPTC keywords (which is backward compatible with unstructured data), and allow selection by these tags. With their "Pro Photo Tools" you can have GPS information and reverse lookup (where the names of nearby towns are automatically filled in), and the data lives in the file.

But then comes the issue of the dictionary you use. And that's a tricky problem.

It makes a lot of sense to stick to a restricted dictionary. Why? Well, consider that you are looking for all photos containing great aunt Maude. If your dictionary entry for her is "Maude", then looking for "Maude" will find all the appropriate pictures. But if some are tagged "Maude", some "Great Aunt Maude", some "GA Maude", some "M Smith", and so on, it's just not going to work for you.

Just now I'm in the process of Geotagging my photographs. Frankly, that's proving hard enough work. I've been at it for months, and I'm only up to 2004. But once that's done, I'm going to start thinking about keywords...

regards,
/alan

Footnote: actually, as an ex file system developer, I believe that data about the pictures should be stored in a separate data stream (in the same way as a Macintosh file has separate data and resource forks). But that doesn't play well with the way we perceive files these days.

 

[handicap18]

I've tried the keywording thing in the past and for me it doesn't work. The extra time it takes to add various keywords it about the same amount of time it takes to find a picture (most times I can find it quicker). So for me, all the pics I take in 2008 go in a 2008 folder. Then from there it gets broken down into folders for each quarter (Jan-Mar, Apr-Jun, etc...). I'll also make other folders for edits and any special events that have lots of pics like T-ball or someone's wedding. I don't change the file names so all my pics stay in the order they were taken.

For our last Disney trip I have a Disney 2007 Trip folder. Then from there I have Day 1, Day 2, etc...

For me this is the most efficient. As with everything else YMMV.

 

[pdarrah]

I've tried the keywording thing in the past and for me it doesn't work. The extra time it takes to add various keywords it about the same amount of time it takes to find a picture (most times I can find it quicker). So for me, all the pics I take in 2008 go in a 2008 folder. Then from there it gets broken down into folders for each quarter (Jan-Mar, Apr-Jun, etc...). I'll also make other folders for edits and any special events that have lots of pics like T-ball or someone's wedding. I don't change the file names so all my pics stay in the order they were taken.

For our last Disney trip I have a Disney 2007 Trip folder. Then from there I have Day 1, Day 2, etc...

For me this is the most efficient. As with everything else YMMV.

I used your system for a number of years and it worked for quite a while - however, I am now getting to the point that it IS taking me longer to find the photo I want. Part of the problem is as I get more and more years and events it is harder to remember which year or which vacation has the photo I need.

I have started using a program called IDImager to help me keep track and keyword and such. I am finding it very flexible, but am also still working on my keywords. IDImager is heirarchacal (sorry about the spelling!) and can use a dotted notation to keep this within the photos. The data is stored both in the database and with the photos if you want it that way. One plus is that if I decide to change my heirarchy, I can drag it around and it will take care of changing it for all the photos it affects. So far, I have only tagged about 2 years of my photos, but I am finding the program easy and efficient for this purpose. I started with the present and am working backwards in time (making a point of tagging new photos when I upload them to the PC from the memory card). I figure that even if I never make it back to 1998 when my first digital photos start, over time I will end up with most of my photos organized!

pdarrah

 

[Groucho]

I have not used the "Do not Export" feature for keywords. This is an interesting thought. Can you help me understand your reasoning for using this feature? It may help others, including me, to know why they would want to use it? Right now, with little thought involved, I can't see the use of it, although there may be a very good reason to do so. I, for one, would like the ability to find "family" members (using your example) using that keyword but there may be better ways.

(Side note: I also like mabas9395's "to tag" idea - Lightroom's import presets are a pretty powerful tool and I suspect much underused by most users - certainly I'm not using them nearly as much as I should, though I do have several develop settings standard now.)

The "do not export" is really pretty critical for hierarchical keywording, IMHO. (Unless you never share keyworded photos.) I try to create as few top-level categories as possible - "places", "family", "friends", "animals", etc. These top-level groups help to keep the lower branches in order, but I don't want, for example, my WDW photos to have "places" as a keyword. This can also be very useful if you're concerned about putting in "sensitive" information, like people's real name, etc.

Fundamentally, I do not buy into what I believe to be the Lightroom / Adobe model. Information about photographs should not be stored in some random database file somewhere. Real life happens, and in that you are going to rename, or copy, or move the photograph files. And if that means that the metadata no longer applies to the pictures, that plain sucks.

No, the place for metadata about a photograph is in the photograph itself (although see the footnote below).

That leaves the EXIF and IPTC fields. But there's a problem there, too. IPTC does not support hierarchical data. So, in an ideal world you might want to filter the pictures in the way that Mark suggests: show me everything taken in the USA. Now drill down to my state. Then to my town, etc.

I don't think you're being entirely fair here. Lightroom doesn't lock away the data, it puts in the exported JPG or (optionally) an XMP sidecar (for raw data, which doesn't have a place for IPTC.) There's really no way for them to do much more than that, the master database has to exist somewhere - surely you're not suggesting that the entire hierarchy tree be bundled with every jpg? That will make for notably larger files, to say nothing of privacy issues. Using a "standard" tree/dictionary is no good, there's very little in my hierarchy that would exist in a "standard" one.

The renaming/moving/copying thing shouldn't be an issue if you shoot raw. You should have no reason to ever rename the original raw file, and LR hands moves pretty smoothly. (Just point it to the new location and it automatically updates its own db the location of every photo in that folder.)

Ultimately, it's an imperfect system, but there's really no other option, without completely reinventing the way we store and share photos. (I don't think file systems are really the problem, even NTFS can have linked filenames - the most common use is when you save a web page, it saves an .htm/.html file and a subdirectory with all the "support" files with the same filename. Change the .htm file's name and the directory name changes with it.

I've tried the keywording thing in the past and for me it doesn't work. The extra time it takes to add various keywords it about the same amount of time it takes to find a picture (most times I can find it quicker).

It all comes down to the tools... LR is the first app I've found that makes keywording easy enough to be worth doing for all the photos. With my last WDW photos, it would take me maybe 5 minutes (no more than 10) to tag a full day's worth of photos (say, 500 shots.) Don't get me wrong - LR is far from perfect. But I haven't seen anything better for keywording yet, but it's successful enough that it's a "safe bet", ie, it's unlikely to disappear any time soon, and if something better comes along, it will probably have the ability to import LR's catalog.

Having things tagged is really useful for me, too, with the shots on my web page... keywords are shown when you look at a photo, and you can click on a keyword and see a "virtual album" of all the photos with that keyword. It makes it pretty easy to find other photos of Big Thunder or Spaceship Earth or whatever.

And like I said before, I think a big part of it is shooting raw, so you have true "originals" that aren't used as anything but originals.

 

[DueyDooDah]

So, let me ask this. Are you using synonyms? If so, do you have a good reference to aid you? I am toying with the idea but until I get a structure I am satisfied with (not saying it will be final, but at least something I am moderately comfortable with) I am shying away from going into that amount of detail. But, if used correctly, I think it could be quite a benefit. Thoughts?

 

[MarkBarbieri]

I use synonym's in two cases - as traditional synonyms and for privacy reasons. In the first case, some things have two common names, so a synonym is appropriate. You might want to tag something as "Disney's Hollywood Studios" with the synonym "Disney-MGM Studios" or "Festival of the Lion King" with the synonym "FOTLK".

In the second case, I use it for privacy with people's names. When I take photos on outings with friends with kids, I often ask whether they are OK with having their kids pictures posted and, if so, how they want to handle names in the metadata - none, first name only, last name only, full name. When they want first names only, I put those in as a synonym, turn on export for the synonym and turn it off for the full name and the family grouping.

It's a bit of a nuisance and (I think) a waste of effort, but some people our very sensitive about things like that and I prefer not to have them freak out when a picture of little "Johnny Goober" appears when they google "Johnny Goober." If you are very privacy sensitive, understand that any keywords you export into photos that you upload are likely to get indexed by search engines.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

Structures (or hierarchies) are a key part of my indexing. It helps me organize my list of keywords. It also gives me lots of free tagging. If I tag a photo with "Astro Orbiter", because of the hierarchy, it also gets tagged with Tomorrowland, Magic Kingdom, Walt Disney World, Florida, and United States. When I tag a photo with "Green Darner", it also inherits the keywords dragonfly, insect (synonym bug), and Animal.

I also find hierarchies useful for grouping people. All the people on the kid's soccer team are under a single grouping people-->teammates-->soccer teams-->Bullfrogs-->Johnny Goober.

've tried the keywording thing in the past and for me it doesn't work. The extra time it takes to add various keywords it about the same amount of time it takes to find a picture (most times I can find it quicker). So for me, all the pics I take in 2008 go in a 2008 folder. Then from there it gets broken down into folders for each quarter (Jan-Mar, Apr-Jun, etc...). I'll also make other folders for edits and any special events that have lots of pics like T-ball or someone's wedding. I don't change the file names so all my pics stay in the order they were taken.

I sympathize with this view. I org my photos in a similar way: \\NAS1\Photos\2008\06-June\19-Juneteenth Celebration\12345678.jpg

That's enough for the vast majority of my needs. It doesn't help, though, with other users. With exported keywords, I get better online searchability so that others can find my pictures. With a keyword database, I can also bring together adhoc selections of pictures. As an example, when my younger son turned four years old, I built a slideshow with 100 of my favorite photos with him in them. With keywords and ratings, that's easy. Having to look through tens of thousands of photos in folders, that's hard.

Even with these advantages, I still don't keyword religiously. The return on investment is questionable for a lot of pictures. That, and I'm lazy (although I prefer to think of it as being focused on effeciency).

If you are really into keywording, I would suggest iMatch. I find it to be a much more powerful keywording tool compared with Lightroom. The feature that I miss most from it is the ability to have shared keywords. I had my people hierarchy set up so that a person might appear as a relative, a neighbor, a coworker, and as part of a group of friends. When I tagged a photo with that person, it got tagged with all of thoese hierarchies. Then he showed up whenever I searched for that group of relatives, or neighbors, or coworkers, etc. With Lightroom, the only way I've found to do anything similar is to add the person multiple times and then to tag every copy of him every time.

iMatch had several other advantages, but that was the main one that stuck out. The big disadvantage is that it's not built into LR. Because I do so much of my photo work in LR, I decided that the advantage of having a superior keywording tool wasn't worth the disadvantage of having to use an external tool.

 

[handicap18]

I sympathize with this view. I org my photos in a similar way: \\NAS1\Photos\2008\06-June\19-Juneteenth Celebration\12345678.jpg

That's enough for the vast majority of my needs. It doesn't help, though, with other users. With exported keywords, I get better online searchability so that others can find my pictures.

This is the thing for me. When I put my images on my computer, other users are looking for them. So I really don't care about how it does or doesn't help others. I have 16,000 or so digital images I've taken since Apr of 2003. I have about 3000 images that get copied into a screen saver folder and those images are displayed on the living room computer screen when the computer isn't being used.

When I was shooting film, all my pics went right into a photo album in the order they were taken. I started doing this when I was 11. 27 years later it still works for me.

As for on-line, I only put the better images on my on-line galleries. I was using keywords with flickr (even then I wasn't really good at it and didn't use many keywords), but that was for the general public to maybe be able to see them if they searched by keywords. I'm now moving away from flickr and transferring to smugmug (keywording is also available here, but the gallery section is easier to organize IMO). Here I have galleries and my friends and family go to the specific gallery they want to view. My mother called me last night to ask how to open her DVD drive. So I don't see he wanting to do a search by specific keywords. This is typical of my friends and family that will be viewing my on-line images. They're not really computer savvy. We typically have over 100 people at our family x-mas party and I can't think of any of them who would be interested in doing searches on a photo gallery. They want it simple. So I keep it simple.

With all this being said, I'll stick with what I said earlier. YMMV.

 

[DueyDooDah]

Here is my keywording hierarchy:

High level:
Animals, Characters, People, Plants, Things, Vacations

Next level:
Pets, Wildlife
Disney, Universal
Family, Friends, Other
Flowers
Bridges, Building, Legos, Ships
Disneyland, Greece, San Diego Wild Animal Park, Sea World, Universal Studios

And then those are broken down further.

I chose to place Characters at a top level as I could not find an appropriate topic to place it under. Mark, I see you placed it under People. I was not comfortable with that as some characters just don't fit. Also, I used the word Things instead of Objects, although they are essentially the same so far.

I do have some overlap in IPTC info and the Vacations section. E.g., in IPTC I have:

United States->California->Anaheim->Disneyland

and in the keyword database:

Vacations->Disneyland

but these have different group meanings as the keywords are further broken into years visited. (BTW: never go on vacation for New Year. It really messes up the year grouping - lol) Now, I could use multiple IPTC searches in Location and Date to accomplish the same thing, but for now I've settled on this scheme. I may remove the Vacation sections though, which will reduce upkeep, if I start to feel more comfortable with using multi-searches. (If you've not done this, under Locations in the IPTC data in LR, click on, say, Disneyland then, while holding down the CTRL key, select Date->2008. You now have all the desired photos displayed. You could then create a Collection for a specific purpose, such as creating a Slideshow, and select choice photos from there.)

During photo imports, I've been using presets with as much relevant info as possible for each specific shoot. This has reduced post work greatly. I have to give minimal attention to most photos now, such as adding specifc location info if I shoot in more than one location. The presets apply nearly all of the proper keywords I use. This really helps to get the work done with the least effort, which keeps me motivated to do the work.

One thing I do that I've not heard others do is create separate Catalogs for each camera I, and my wife, shoot/have shot with. I have catalogs for the 30D, S80, S3IS, and mye wife's first camera, a Kodak DX4530. This allows my to work on my photos and my wife to work on hers. Once we are done, we can create a super catalog of all photos and all cameras if need be. To do this properly, and keep the keywords matched, I keep a master keyword list in text format. If new keywords are added or if any change, I update the master list and import it into each catalog. The problem comes during a change to a keyword. That word must be changed in each catalog by hand to ensure the links don't break. This could be avoided if I kept only one catalog, but that does not work well for me either.

One last thing. Mark, I still don't understand your explanation of sharing keywords. I'll have to DL iMatch to see it in action to get it. Thanks for pointing it out.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

One last thing. Mark, I still don't understand your explanation of sharing keywords. I'll have to DL iMatch to see it in action to get it. Thanks for pointing it out.

Let me try again. I'll use the example of Mickey Mouse. For those unfamiliar with him, Mickey is a large, talking, cartoon mouse frequently seen in Disney media. There are lots of ways that I could keyword Mickey in my keyword hierarchy. Here are some examples:

Animals
Mammals
Rodents
Mice
Mickey Mouse

Characters
Animated Characters
Disney Characters
Mickey Mouse

If I set the keywords up like this in Lightroom and I assign the first instance of Mickey Mouse (the one under "Mice"), it will automatically assign the keywords "Animals", "Mammals", "Rodents", and "Mice". It will not assign "Characters", "Animated Characters", and "Disney Characters".

With a "shared keyword" capability, when I set up the second "Mickey Mouse" entry, I tell it that this refers to the same thing as the first "Mickey Mouse" entry. Now, whenever I assign either keyword, it is as though I assigned both of them so all of the ancestors of both are automatically applied.

A more useful real world example is my neighbor, Mark Furber. I work at the same company he does (for the third time). He's a neighbor. He's also a friend. He has four girls and I have two boys, so we may end up in-laws someday. He might be in multiple places in my people hierarchy, like this:

People
Neighbors
Furber Family
Mark Furber
Co-Workers
Anadarko Coworkers
Mark Furber
Friends
Furber Family
Mark Furber

Now, if I take a picture of Mark and keyword tag him, he automatically shows up when I pull up pictures of friends, neighbors, or co-workers.

 

[jann1033]

why do you have 3" mark furber"s and 2 "furber family" s
never mind i didn't realize it was differnt 3 catagories