Luminous Landscape Forum

Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Adobe Lightroom Q&A => Topic started by: headmj on December 29, 2012, 08:18:09 pm

Title: Automating keyword insertion
Post by: headmj on December 29, 2012, 08:18:09 pm

I need to have the camera generated file name inserted into the keyword field or another field that I can search.  Is there a way to automate that process?  I have looked fairly extensively but cannot find a solution.

Thanks

Mike Head

Title: Re: Automating keyword insertion
Post by: Tony Jay on December 29, 2012, 10:06:50 pm

Maybe I am missing something, but my version of Lightroom allows searching filenames by filtering or as part of setting up collections.
Mike, you should not need to place filenames into other fields at all for them to be searchable.
If I have missed the boat on something here let me know.

Tony Jay

Title: Re: Automating keyword insertion
Post by: headmj on December 29, 2012, 10:25:20 pm

Tony,

I probably did not make myself clear.  No surprise there!  When I am forced to change the filename for any reason, I lose track of the original camera generated file name.  I use the camera generated name as a sort of image serial number.  It takes time to enter it manually in the key words and sometimes I forget  ;D.  Here is an example of when it would be handy.  When I post images to Flickr, I may have several very similar images.  When someone asks for a reprint it can sometimes take me a while to file the exact digital Negative.  If it was already in the keywords I could find it quick.  Having the original camera generated filename makes it easy for me.

Thanks for your reply

Mike

Title: Re: Automating keyword insertion
Post by: john beardsworth on December 30, 2012, 03:59:47 am

Traditionally, or pedantically-speaking, the Title field should be used for this purpose and there are certainly people who use it in this way, using tools like my Search Replace Transfer plug-in to copy the filename to the title. In practice, most people want the title to be the title, so you could use SRT to add the filename as a suffix to the title. If you want to copy the filename to the keywords, you would need some kind of plug-in or script. SRT doesn't copy to keywords because hierarchical keywords make coding more complex (eg which parent should the keyword go under?) and I've had no demand to automate cluttering up keywords with filenames.

Have you looked to see if Jeffrey Friedl's Flickr plug-in can add keywords as part of the export process? That would keep your catalogue cleaner.

John

Title: Re: Automating keyword insertion
Post by: Tony Jay on December 30, 2012, 05:12:26 am

John has beaten me to it!
Another thought is to acquire Seth Resnick's book on Lightroom workflow - he does address these sorts of issues and suggests several solutions as well.

Tony Jay

Title: Re: Automating keyword insertion
Post by: Ken Bennett on December 30, 2012, 09:25:47 am

I do this with Photo Mechanic as part of my initial edit and metadata application. Files are renamed using our naming convention, then a full IPTC caption is added, in which one of the fields is the variable {filenamebase}, which inserts the filename.

Not sure how to do this with LR, sorry.

People regularly send me tiny photos that they renamed as "photo 1" and ask for the high-res version. Ugh. As long as the metadata hasn't been stripped, I can find the original quickly and easily. (They grab these from our online archive, which they can view but not download. For some reason they are incapable of looking at the photos with their original names. Not sure why.)

Title: Re: Automating keyword insertion
Post by: headmj on December 30, 2012, 12:45:49 pm

Thank you for the information.  I am printing it out and I will look for your plug-in so I can fully understand.

Mike

Title: Re: Automating keyword insertion
Post by: headmj on December 30, 2012, 12:47:42 pm

I have several books and I may have Seth's.  I will check

Thanks

Mike