Nesting Keywords breaks them
I recently cataloged two folders, nef & jpeg. The nef folders contain Nikon raw images with the Nikon sidecar files; the jpeg folder contains files from different sources, mainly smartphones. The jpeg files had been cataloged in Lightroom and had the keywords embedded.
The cataloging brought in all keywords correctly, except they all came in as flat keywords; I moved keywords to nest them as needed; however, this created an issue where even though the images have the "keyword" in place, they cannot be searched. I tracked the cause to the following.
The correct keyword should be "People < < Family < Mike"
However, after I nested Mike inside of Family and Family inside of People, the image's keyword looks like "People < Family < Mike." If I edit the image's keyword and change it to the correct format, the pictures appear in searches, smart albums, etc.
Given that I have thousands of images, I am not going to edit each one of them. Has anyone experienced this?
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"People < < Family < Mike" looks to me like it has an extraneous < in it. Only one of them is needed to denote nesting. There's something wrong with that but I can't say without seeing your People entry in the Keyword List.
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How were the JPGs created? Did you export them from Lightroom? There is a parameter on Lightroom's export that needs to be checked to include a keyword hierarchy on the exported images, otherwise only the flat keywords are included.
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Miguel, I wrote an article on keyword problems and how to solve them. It is at Fixing Keyword Issues. It's a couple of years old and most of the problems described have been fixed but that doesn't fix the faulty keywords that were created; you have to do that yourself.
I remember seeing the < < problem when I wrote that. As I recall, the only way to fix it is to change it to some temporary keyword so you can retain access to the pictures that have the problem. Now recreate the proper keyword hierarchy then you can apply it to all those images with the temporary keyword before removing it. You should be able to do this at the Family level.
Here's what I would do. First of all find all the photos that have that problem Keyword and create an Album to hold them while you work on the keywords. If you search for keywords, then make changes the photos can be removed from the Search Results and you'll loose track of it. That won't happen if they are all together in an album.
Next, Rename 'Family' to some temporary name like 'F'. Create a new Family then move F's children Keywords into Family. Once everything has been moved, the 'F' Keyword can be removed.
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Thanks, Brian; I'll read the article; your suggestion of renaming and creating again sounds logical.
I probably made the mess myself; I have owned the product since 2019, but I only recently decided to get serious about learning it. If the above does not work, I may re-catalog the folders.
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David, good question about the JPEGs; I did not export them from Lightroom, but Lightroom is saving the keywords to the file; I need to remember what setting I used in Lightroom to get that to happen.
I just did a test on another computer where I have only imported a handful of NEF files with the sidecars and the same behavior happen.
I'll sort that out, as part of the learning process!
Thanks for your feedback.0 -
If the above does not work, I may re-catalog the folders. That will not fix the problem. The catalog will read what is stored in the metadata for the images. If that metadata is corrupt, the new catalog database will contain that corruption. The catalog is just a reflection of what is in the photos.
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I ended up resetting and starting over; I had made a big mess of the keywords. I learned a few things along the way.
I reset everything, restored the original XMP files from Lightroom, then cataloged the NEF files, and all keywords came in correctly. I am working with the images in an external drive until I can feel comfortable pulling the plug on Lightroom.
I think the previous problem came about when I cataloged the JPEGs. I am going to proceed with caution importing some JPEGs with the embedded data and see if that causes any problems.
Thanks for all your feedback; it's been very helpful.
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