I have been looking for a long time for some software that would allow me to manage keywords in an efficient manner. What do I mean by efficient? It’s pretty simple: all I want is the ability to group my keywords into categories or domains. For example: I want car, boat, ship, carriage, bus and bicycle to all be grouped into a domain called transportation. This seems simple, but I can’t really find any decently priced 
software to do that. Now, I was suspecting that Adobe Lightroom might do what I wanted but the price was way too much for me! Eventually I decided to give Lightroom a try and found out why people like it.
Start learning now: Download my "BIG" book. Download my Picasa book.
So, what was I trying to accomplish ?
Well, I decided to apply keywords to a bunch of folders containing pictures from my 2007 trip to Europe…then I got so excited that I started adding keywords to some pictures from my California trips. In total, I tagged close to 700 pictures as my first exercise. As I have written before, I like to think about my keywords before creating new ones. Otherwise, I know I’ll be creating a bunch of duplicate keywords. My method involves creating categories of keywords first and then assigning individual keywords to these categories. Would Adobe Lightroom be up to the task? I just wanted to make sure it’s a great tool for organization. Who knows, maybe someday when I make a lot of money from my blogs I would be able to afford it
Learn how to manage your image tags with Adobe Lightroom 2.5
This article will describe only the management of keywords using Adobe Lightroom. I will not get into editing photos and other meta data for your pictures. Plus, I have Lightroom only for 30 days because I have downloaded the trial version and I don’t have time to play with all the other cool things that it can do.
Let’s get to work!
Adding keywords to lots of pictures will take a long time. So, you’ve got to be sure that you’re going in the right direction so you don’t have to undo what you have done wrong. First, let’s create some categories for the places I have visited. So I created one category called europe. In this category I created one for each country belgium, france, switzerland and netherlands. Then for each country I have added one keyword for each city. This was a no brainer…just simple! Then I started to assign these keywords based on the folders I had. The good thing was that my folder names were very descriptive and it was easy to apply the location tags. Adobe Lightroom is pretty cool when it comes to bulk tagging of images…you can select all the pictures in a directory, then right-click on the keyword you want to assign and choose “Assign keyword to selected images”…pretty simple…so it’s cool
Start learning now: Download my "BIG" book. Download my Picasa book.
E-MAIL RSS Twitter
Amazing resources:
Lowest prices on coolest gadgets
Amazing web hosting
Best website statistics
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey, thanks for the numerous tips on your website! They’re very helpful as I just got Lightroom and am now seriously looking to organize my photos.
I’ve just discovered something that you didn’t mention in your post though. Lightroom doesn’t automatically write your keywords out to IPTC.
“Up to now, I’ve been talking about XMP metadata relating to the Lightroom develop instructions. You may be wondering about the other metadata, such as keywords, ratings, etc. The same holds true for them. You need to push this data onto an original file if you want it to travel with the file outside of the Lightroom environment. You can do this on an image-by-image (or selection-by-selection) basis from the Library module menu command Metadata?Save Metadata to File. Or you can set your catalog preferences so it’s done automatically to all files and all file types (File?Catalog Settings/Metadata tab, then check Automatically write changes into XMP).”
http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/2008/01/01/saving-metadata.html
Maybe you could mention this in your post
Thanx for your comments Alvin…thanx for the link as well. Good article. It is true…Lightroom doesn’t automatically save your image metadata to your files…you have to set it up for that. This issue applies to all photo management software…they all have to be setup for this operation. I have actually mentioned this issue in another article: http://www.organizepictures.com/2008/07/portable-image-metadataportable-image-metadata
Your comment made me read that article again and make it more clear…so thanx again. I hope you get to finish organizing your pictures. The more pictures you have the more you need to organize it.
Hello. I really enjoy your organization tips and all. I reorganized all my folders using your idea about events. It took a tortuously long time but I think it will be easier to search now.
Before, I organized my folders using location based keywords, which seems now to be more appropriate to do with tags. For example, I would make folders like this: Country/Name of State OR City/Place in State Or City. But your way is better. I like it. Thanks.
Now though, I want to tag all those 1000s of pictures! : |
Some of them are already tagged from a long time ago. But, needless to say, many new and untagged pictures have gathered so I need to re haul the whole system. I use Windows Vista Windows Photo Gallery to do the tagging. It came with the computer. I can also make Categories with that Software too. Also I can do batch tagging.
Another thing. I also backed up all those reorganized folders and photos on 7 DVDs. (Cheapest method right now).
My original intent was to move all my original pictures completely off my hard drive (because space is becoming so tight) and then only keep thumbnails or scaled down copies that I can search. This would turn 28 GB into only 1 GB on my PC. Do you know an easy way to do that?
Once again, thanks for your site.
Doesn’t Windows Photo Gallery in Windows Vista do the same thing?
tj…thanx for your comment. I’m glad you found my site helpful. It looks like you have done a lot of work but it will pay off in the long term.
I’m not too familiar with Windows Vista tool for organizing/tagging pictures. If it does categories and tags you’re half way there. I’m not sure if it supports IPTC/XMP fields, which means that the tags you’re creating can be written in the image files themselves. If you can’t do that, all your tags and keywords will not transfer on another operating system or software…you will only see them on your computer. So, in this respect I don’t believe Windows Photo Gallery works the same as Lightroom or ACDSee.
Read this article for an better explanation:
The road frequently travelled by image metadata
Yes…keep doing those backups they are a life saver.