Keyword Reassignments

[John Caldwell]

My keyword list is a mess. In the past, I've entered persons' names as stand-alone keywords and I now regret that. My wish is to have all person names as KW inside of People as the superlative, or parent, KW. Is there a way to modify a KW so it can become a child KW of another KW?

As it is now, I am manually dragging Mark Smith into People, but it's tedious because the Keyword list is so huge. I would love to control click on Mark Smith, and be given the option of moving Mary Smith inside another KW: People. We do have the ability to control click a KW and create a new KW Inside of the clicked KW, but not to move the selected KW inside another.

How do you all nest your keywords, and how do you modify that nesting as your needs change?

Many thanks,

John-

[RogerW]

You can export your entire keyword list as a text file.  Open the file in a word processor or spreadsheet then use cut and paste to reorder it.  Once finished, save as a txt file and reimport to LR.

[John Caldwell]

You can export your entire keyword list as a text file.  Open the file in a word processor or spreadsheet then use cut and paste to reorder it.  Once finished, save as a txt file and reimport to LR.

Wow. Let me get busy with this an ask more questions once I've made some attempts, Roger.

Many thanks.

John-

[john beardsworth]

If you have already assigned keywords, this method will produce results like this, where the number represents how many pictures are assigned to that keyword

Friends - 7
- Joe Doe - 0
- Mark Smith - 0
Joe Doe - 4
Mark Smith - 3

After that you will need to drag those pictures to the new hierarchical keywords, then delete the top level "name" keywords.

Even if you do it that way, it's still plenty of work. An alternative thought though - what do you hope to gain? For example, if a picture is already assigned to "friends" and to "Mark Smith", you can already use smart collections or the filter panel to find those pictures quickly when you actually need to do so - and this might be a better use of your time than building a hierarchy speculatively, not knowing whether you will actually bother finding pictures through it (when you can find them equally well through SCs/filters).

John

[John Caldwell]

If you have already assigned keywords, this method will produce results like this, where the number represents how many pictures are assigned to that keyword

Friends - 7
- Joe Doe - 0
- Mark Smith - 0
Joe Doe - 4
Mark Smith - 3

After that you will need to drag those pictures to the new hierarchical keywords, then delete the top level "name" keywords.

Even if you do it that way, it's still plenty of work. An alternative thought though - what do you hope to gain? For example, if a picture is already assigned to "friends" and to "Mark Smith", you can already use smart collections or the filter panel to find those pictures quickly when you actually need to do so - and this might be a better use of your time than building a hierarchy speculatively, not knowing whether you will actually bother finding pictures through it (when you can find them equally well through SCs/filters).

John

Thanks, John. In what text editor have you been able to see the numeric counts describing keyword usage? I don't see those numbers in Text Edit or MS Word.

As for the greater goal, you do have a point. And it is a lot of work, to be sure.

Thanks for your help, John.

John-

[john beardsworth]

No, I was only trying to mimic how things would look in LR.

[Mike Boden]

I use an application called IDimager. There's a bit of a learning curve with the application, but once learned you could easily accomplish your goal. If you're using a Windows computer, check it out: IDimager

[KirbyKrieger]

... My wish is to have all person names as KW inside of People as the superlative, or parent, KW. Is there a way to modify a KW so it can become a child KW of another KW?

In LR3b, one can select multiple keywords by pressing {Command} while clicking a keyword.  It seems not so tedious to, for example, {Command}+Click all the proper names, and then drag them all and drop them on the keyword "People".  That will make all the selected keywords children of the keyword "People".

Of course, this can be repeated for any classification scheme.

[John Caldwell]

In LR3b, one can select multiple keywords by pressing {Command} while clicking a keyword.  It seems not so tedious to, for example, {Command}+Click all the proper names, and then drag them all and drop them on the keyword "People".  That will make all the selected keywords children of the keyword "People".

Of course, this can be repeated for any classification scheme.

The same approach applies to LR2, Kirby. It's just difficult when the list is quite large. It would help me if you could selct multiple KW, using the method you suggest, and then right-click that selection to reveal "Move KW inside Parent KW" rather than dragging. It may sound silly, but my list is so large that the move is awkward.