Keywording Tricks

DavidTO

I'm getting about 3k images scanned, which means I'm going to have to keyword all of them.

Anyone have any tips for streamlining keywording for that many images? There'll be plenty of repeated keywords, names and locations and what-not.

:ear

bham

DavidTO wrote:

I'm getting about 3k images scanned, which means I'm going to have to keyword all of them.

Anyone have any tips for streamlining keywording for that many images? There'll be plenty of repeated keywords, names and locations and what-not.

Lightroom. You can highlight multiple photos, type in the keyword once and its added to all of them, you can add keywords on import to all the photos, so import by related groups or days or trips or events. If you are already spending that much to get them scanned a little more is worth it.

DavidTO

Yah, I was thinking about lightroom. I was thinking that I could make collections for each keyword, then just drag images onto the collections that fit. Then select all in that collection and add a keyword once to all of them. I haven't tested it, but I was thinking about doing it that way.

colourbox

In Lightroom, do you already know about the Keyword Sets and the Keyword Shortcut? I use them because they allow one-keypress keywording. Metadata/Set Keyword Shortcut lets you enter one keyword (or phrase) that the shortcut will apply, then you can arrow-key through the grid and press the shortcut (Command-K in Lightroom 2) whenever you want to keyword an image with that keyword.

The thing about Keyword Sets is that you can create sets of 9, and when you press the Option/Alt key, you'll see a number appear next to each keyword. This means that if you press say Option-2 it applies the keyword from position 2. So if "gorilla" is at position 5 and I select any 23 images of gorillas, I press Option-5 and now all 23 images have the "gorilla" keyword. I tend to use the set Recent Keywords the most. Lightroom keeps track of my last 9 used keywords and if I want to add one I just hit whatever option-Number shortcut goes with that. If you don't see the Keyword Set grid click on that triangle on the right to expand it.

I have not gotten into the Keyword Suggestions much (new in LR2), but it's supposed to notice if you use certain keywords together, and suggest them as a group whenever you enter one of them. It doesn't seem to have keyboard shortcuts that I can find (yet), but you can just click the keyword grid tiles.

If you get into these at all, you can save incredible amounts of typing.