Keywording Photographs, Part 3

This is the third segment in my series of Photoshop Lightroom keywording tips. Last time I covered how to create keyword files that you could import into Lightroom as an easy way to build large keyword databases. This time we’ll cover the last two ways to add keywords from within Lightroom. The final two methods are the most frequently used and probably straightforward of the three methods.

Probably the easiest way to add keywords to the database is to type them into the “Click here to add keywords” box (or the larger box above it). In addition to adding the keywords typed to your photographs, new keywords are also added to Lightroom’s keyword database.

The Lightroom 2 Keywording Panel

There are a few tricks here though. First, the “click here” box supports what I’m going to call Lightroom’s arrow syntax. That is you can use the right-angle-bracket or greater-than symbol (>) to specify the relationship between two keywords. In this case, the arrow points towards the parent so you enter the child keyword first then the parent. You can also repeat the arrow to create deeper hierarchies in a single command as well.

The exact behavior of the arrow syntax does change depending on whether or not one or more of the keywords are already in Lightroom’s keyword database. If none of the keywords entered are in the keyword database, Lightroom will create a new hierarchy with the right most keyword at the top and each successive keyword being a child.

For example, entering “keyword 1 > keyword 2 > keyword 3″ produces the hierarchy shown in figure 1.

If a parent keyword exists in the database, Lightroom will intelligently append the new child keyword to it.

For example, for a database similar to what’s shown below in figure 2.

Typing “grandchild > child” would add the keyword grandchild under child as show in figure 3 below.

Finally, if the child keyword exists in two hierarchies the arrow is necessary to specify which of the two keywords should be used.

For example if you have a keyword database as show below in figure 4.

Now say you wanted to keyword a picture of smoked salmon you would need to type “salmon > food” so Lightroom doesn’t create either a new top-level keyword. Which is an important point to remember, Lightroom isn’t able to disambiguate identical keywords nested in different hierarchies and when presented with such a situation instead of guessing it creates a new top-level keyword instead.

The third and final way to enter keywords is through the Create Keyword Tag dialog box. This can be accessed though either the + icon on the top of the Keyword List panel or by right clicking on an existing keyword and choosing either “Create Keyword tag” or “Create Keyword Tag Inside” from the context menu.

The Lightroom 2 Create Keyword Tag dialog box.

The Create Keyword Tag dialog box exposes all of the functionality you had available to you when creating a keyword file. The dialog is very straightforward; you enter the Keyword you want in the Keyword Tag text box. Synonyms go in the synonym box. The 4 check boxes allow you to tell Lightroom how to handle the new keyword and how to apply it to images and exported images.

This concludes my series on keywording in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2. I hope this has provided some insight into how Lightroom handles adding and building keyword libraries. On parting word of warning, in my experience, the biggest pitfall is failing to put some thought into your keyword hierarchy before starting it. Sorting and reorganizing poorly thought out keyword hierarchies can only be done though the Keyword List pain and is quite time consuming and frustrating when the list gets exceptionally long.