Underscores in keywords

rluhman

Is there a better option than using underscores in keywords? My keyword convention is lastname_firstname and it works just fine. However, when an underscore keyword is combined with a keyword that is numerical all sorts of problems seem to occur (URL doesn't display correctly, depending on the location of the underscore that keyword may not be recognized).

denisegoldberg

Have you tried using spaces?

I have many keywords that are multiple words separated by spaces. They work both alone and in combination with other keywords.

Can you provide a link to your site and a list of the keywords that are problems when used together?

rluhman

I see two problems with spaces.

1. I currently have over 11,000 images and changing all of the keywords would be a gigantic task, not to mention that lastname_firstname really is nice.
2. Spaces make it more difficult to distinguish individual keywords on the keyword page.

I was hoping for some suggestion whereas my category keywords; the ones that are currently formatted as YYYYMONTH_Category (e.g. 2017September_Birthday) to something else. I have tried replacing the underscore with a period but that gives the same situation as the underscore. I've tried brackets, parentheses or dashes as well but those are stripped off during a Lightroom upload. Finally, I have tried changing the category keyword to 2017SeptemberBirthday but that also has problems as soon as that keyword is combined with something that has an underscore.

As mentioned I really would prefer not changing my lastname_firstname convention as there are 11,000 images with that type of keyword.

pilotdave

I use spaces as well. I think I did some formatting on my keywords page to add some extra space between keywords. I'd have to check.

There might not be a really quick way to bulk change the keywords (smugmug removed that feature years ago for some reason), but with Sherlock's Chrome extension, it might not be AS bad as you think. You'd need to figure out maybe a smart gallery to get as many photos in one gallery as possible, but with the extension you could replace an underscore with a space (in every keyword) in a couple clicks.

Dave

denisegoldberg

@rluhman said:
...when an underscore keyword is combined with a keyword that is numerical all sorts of problems seem to occur (URL doesn't display correctly, depending on the location of the underscore that keyword may not be recognized).

As I requested above, can you provide a link to your site so we can see the issue you are experiencing? I wonder if the problem is more with the numerical keywords but without seeing the behavior I'm just guessing.

rluhman

I went ahead and removed all underscores and at this point the behavior seems fine.