Lightroom: Keyword options no longer available in LR4

Great work, Lightroom team! :)

My comment was only meant to suggest that many people considered the previous odd behaviour (check export, check export synonyms, uncheck export) unintuitive at best. The behaviour always seemed kludgy, as if it was a side-effect of some other change.

Of course, the problem is that if it was a kludge it can easily be reverted by accident.

The problem is that this interface is not a simple set of checkboxes -- as you have noticed, there is some observer feedback going on that creates a bit more of a complicated interface.

Or there was a decision to not persist what was considered bugwards compatible behaviour. No one really knows.

Personally, I'm hoping that this was an oversight, and that eventually we will have a way to maintain full keywords, but have substitutions for exporting. At the very least Adobe doesn't generally like to violate the principle of least surprise, which is definitely the case here.

We'll continue to merge problem reports here, as more and more people are seeing that keywords on export are not what they were in Lr3.

Hi Benjamin

Maybe LR3 had some defects, but it worked very well with hierarchy keyword lists, of serious keywording. I'm selling keyword lists containing up to 80.000+ keyword and now LR4 have messed it up! I think this is not very serious for a company like Adobe.

I recommend to make an option in Lightroom Preference to keep the possibilities like in LR3, where it worked very well.

I am a professional photographer and I have promoted and arranged LR classes for many years, but now I feel that Adobe is doing something very bad. For me and my clients this is a problem.

The main advantage of Lightroom regarding Aperture and other programs is the great keywording features in LR3...

I really hope Adobe is taking this issue serious and don't file it as "not a problem". I'm getting quite frustrated about this issue.

OJL

The Include on Export setting is fundamentally too blunt to hope to satisfy two conflicting needs. Rather than restore the buggy behaviour and p off the group of users who do want the parent keyword to control its children, perhaps what is needed is a second check box "Export Children"? This would mean the parent keyword might be set so it itself will not export, but its child keywords would be.

But this needs a lot of care, and I can't see it being resolved quickly. Apart from issues such as top-down control and privacy, users could get themselves into trouble with different settings at different levels.

I've always thought hierarchical keywords are more trouble than they're worth!

John

@Benjamin,

I was afraid of this. Unfortunately, I also used the bugwards compat behaviour to allow for tagging substitutions (e.g., my daughter is tagged with her full name, but her internet nickname(s) is/are exportable). My bad, as I knew the Lr3 behaviour was probably a bug -- greying out set controls is an obvious warning sign! It was pretty clear I was relying on a kludge.

I'm going to think hard about a solution, but I'm pretty sure that a possible solution will use Friedl's Metadata Wrangler, which is a pretty tight piece of kit. I think it has an ill-used (by me) regex tag substitution panel that should fit the bill. I urge others to look a this plugin if they are heavily invested in keywords. (It also happens to fix a MacRoman conversion problem in some unicode chars in keywords on some Macs, but that is a different story. I suppose I should check to see if Lr 4 has fixed that yet.)

I think it is worth mentioning two things:

1. This change didn't change the tags as they are applied to photos in the catalogue, or the list of keywords.

2. This change does change metadata on the keywords (or is that meta-metadata?) that has the effect of suppressing keywords as they are applied to renditions.

As for (2), we have a situation where keywords were not leaked in renditions. In cases like this, where difficult decisions have to be made, it is always better to err on the side of safety.

So, it isn't completely the end of the world. Just another step closer to the heat-death of the universe.

@ Benjamin

I agree that keywording in LR3 was not perfect, but still the best keywording software available on the market. In fact the use of hierarchy keywords list in LR has been my main reason why I have used LR since LR1.5. Most of my image editing is done in Photoshop + Nik Software.

I also agree that keywording in Lightroom has some limitations and potential confusions (if you don't know what you are doing). For my commercial keyword lists I have written keywords in large spreadsheets and developed (together with a programmer) a software for convert CSV-files to Lightroom-friendly UTF-8 txt-files (which are imported into LR).

The last 5 years I have worked hundreds of hours making hierarchy keyword lists, mainly for nature photographers and in norwegian language: http://www.naturfokus.com/webshop-no/... and now I'm done with some advanced Keyword lists for all the birds in the world: http://www.naturfokus.com/webshop-en/... (was planned to be released this week). These keyword lists with up to 80.000+ different keywords (for 14.474 different bird species) worked perfect in LR3 and in the LR4 Beta, but not good with LR4.

The structure of the imported txt-file in my system is like this:

[BIRDS_of_the WORLD-vENG10D]
........Wildlife
................[Birds]
....................... {Bird}
....................... [GAMEBIRDS]
............................... {Gamebird}
................................[Grouses]
....................................... {Grouse}
....................................... Ruffed Grouse
................................................{Phasianidae}
................................................{Bonasa umbellus}

........ = TAB (this feedback site don't show TAB right)
[ ] - not exported keywords
{ } - synonyms

What's visible in Ligthroom LR3 and LR4 for this example is:

BIRDS_of_the WORLD-vENG10D
........Wildlife
................Birds
........................GAMEBIRDS
................................Grouses
........................................Ruffed Grouse

If you select keyword "Ruffed Grouse", the following keywords will be exported in LR3: Wildlife, Bird, Gamebird, Grouse, Ruffed Grouse, Phasianidae and Bonasa umbellus, which is what my clients want to have.

In LR4 only 3 keywords will be exported with this list: Ruffed Grouse, Phasianidae and Bonasa umbellus which is not good at all.

To get all the desired keywords I have to redesign the Keyword lists to this structure:

[BIRDS_of_the WORLD-vENG10D]
.......[Wildlife]
................[Birds]
........................[GAMEBIRDS]
................................[Grouses]
........................................Ruffed Grouse
................................................{Phasianidae}
................................................{Bonasa umbellus}
................................................{Wildlife}
................................................{Bird}
................................................{Gamebird}
................................................{Grouse}

This is in my opinion back to the stone-age, and Synonyms like Wildlife and Bird will be written 14.474 times (under each keyword for bird specie) instead of 1 or a few times. The user may not easy activate or dis-activate a keyword, but have to do it under each of the 14.474. If one word is misspelled I or my clients have to correct it hundreds or thousands of times. You can still call it a "Hierarchy" based keyword list, but it's a big step backward.

The open structure in LR3 was brilliant for making advanced keyword lists.

My questions for you or someone else in the Adobe team:

1. Did Adobe know about this issue in LR4 for advanced keyword lists, or was it a big surprise Adobe as for me and many other photographers?

2. Why is this page filed as "Not a problem". Does the Adobe Team not understand the problems with advanced Keyword lists in LR4?

My recommendation: Make the system open (as in LR3), but make it clearer for the user what to do or not for the keywords you want / don't want to be exported.

Best regards
Ole Jørgen

What are all those plurals for?
Why not just make it lke this?

[BIRDS_of_the WORLD-vENG10D]
........Wildlife
................Bird
....................... Gamebird
................................Grouse
....................................... Ruffed Grouse
................................................{Phasianidae}
................................................{Bonasa umbellus}

Dorin
.......... = TAB
I had to write it like this because this feedback-site don't show TAB-separated fields correct.

The imported TXT-file with keywords for Lightroom is TAB-separated

OJL

No, I was not talking about tabs.

Why write, for example, Birds twice — Birds in plural, then Bird in singular as synonym? Isn't just Bird (without synonyms) enough?

Dorin

Some like the keywords in both Singular and Plural. In this example the exported keywords are in singular, but it's easy (at least in LR3) to change some of the non-exported plural keywords, so they also will be included in the export.

NB: This is only an example to show the problem with LR4, not an example of best practice in keywording.

OJL

Dorin,
The plural form works best as keyword because a search for "bird" will make hits on both "bird" and "birds". if you use the singular form and search for "birds", you get no hit at all. English is pretty nice that way; there are only a few exceptions, like goose/geese for example.

Btw, using plural for group names and singular for species names seems kinda logic to me... :-)

I have this similar problem and believe the issue has to do with LR3 users who are not-very-clever. If they believe a keyword parent should NOT be exported, then that keyword should NOT be in that hierarchy in the first place. For example, using the file-path in the footer of a document would expose the naming structure of your file which is very obvious. They should use Collections for that purpose.

The problem with this issue in LR4 is now for people who have very detailed, structured sets of images, it is now very difficult to maintain a useful keyword vocabulary.

In my case, I have images of equipment and engineering related items. For example, I will have keyword parent-child groups like 'Railway', 'Type', 'Manufacturer', 'Model', 'Sub-Group Number'.

I do not want Keywords 'Type', for that means nothing by itself, but excluding this will not include 'Railway', which is means a lot.

To me, this 'bug' is really a defect in the masses' way of thinking...

What you fail to understand is that because Lightroom fails to offer custom fields, users are stuffing into keywords all sorts of information that doesn't belong there (under any interpretation of IPTC standards). So privacy is a valid concern. Users need to be able to quickly shut off exporting of such workflow or internal keywords, and fixing the bug has achieved that.

John - So LR4 is now intended for "photographers" who don't know what should be in their keywords. What a silly answer (or a silly upgrade)! Are you answering as an Adobe employee or just guessing what the Adobe Team has done. In my eyes they have made a bug, not fixed a bug.

If the Keyword Options in LR3 is a big problem for amateurs, why can't Adobe make info videos about how to use keywords, how to include / exclude keywords and how to build hierarchy keyword lists (or where to buy them). This is not very difficult or complicated to understand.

If this "bug fix" in LR4 is intended for amateurs who don't know much about keywords, I recommend Adobe to offer a LR4 PRO version for photographers who know what kind of keywords they should use (IPTC standards) based on the LR3 keyword option (with bug). To be honest - I think this "bug" in LR3 is brilliant for large hierarchy keyword lists !!

Thank you for pointing out what you thought I "fail to understand", John. If you read my post again you might see that's exactly what I too pointed at by my reference to Microsoft Word. There will always be users who misapply functionality. It is then the user that compromise his privacy; not the software maker.
So appparently, why Adobe cuts the hand of those who use their software as intended, at the benefit of those who don't; that's still the only thing "fail to understand".

That's why I call for better reasons from Adobe for putting a large number of Lightroom users in a very awkward situation, and I still don't think it's too much to ask.

It would be more helpful not to distort when you paraphrase.... Frankly, "amateurs" are often professionals in their own fields and are very often more "professional" than those who just earn their living from photography. So let's dump the "for amateurs" stuff, please.

The fact is that people have been using keywords for a range of non-standard purposes (eg just today I read a post elsewhere where a "pro" adds a keyword "Out of focus") and I've given you one root cause. Adobe need to consider how people are actually using LR before deciding whether a bug is not to be fixed and is to be converted into a feature.

Adobe employees have the word "employee" beneath their icon.

John, It would also be helpful if you don't presume to know what other people understand and not. I can perfectly empathise with your position that this function has created an awkward situation for some users. However the current situation has demonstrated Adobe's solution creates as many problems as it fix, and is therefore disqualified from being called an improvement. You are absolutely correct that "Adobe need to consider how people are actually using LR". Those who apply hierarchical keywords correctly are not "actually using LR" any less than others.

Btw, your suggestion above to have another checkbox saying "export children" is interesting. I see a a parallel to how file access rights are managed in operating systems.

I tend to feel Adobe have made the right call that helps more people, but I don't pretend it's ideal for those who are purist about what belongs in keywords (which would include me) and also structure them in hierarchies (which I don't) and took advantage of the LR3 behaviour. I'd be pretty surprised if any real fix like "export children" change or keyword sets (my idea - an equivalent to collection sets) happened quickly though. That's just being realistic about the pace of change.

I'm not sure there's an obvious way forward for those who took advantage of the old behaviour. Can these do-not-export parent keywords be identified and killed after LR export? For instance, some people use ~ as a prefix for these keywords so an export post processing filter could manipulate them via Exiftools. Horrible, and only possible if there's a prefix or some other hook, but the plugin community might be able to fill that gap.

Jostein, that is exactly how I feel about the issue - you've worded it more concisely than I could ever attempt to on my own. It is a great solution.

I've jumped head first into the same problem with people's full name as keyword, and exporting a synonym with only their first name. Among other issues.

Have anyone thought of adding the chekboxes _after_ the input fields? Something like this:

Keyword name: [__________________] [x] Don't export
Synonyms: [__________________] [x] Don't export

[x] Export containing keywords

The "Export containing keywords" would only apply if either keyword or synonyms are exported.

Whatever the outcome is, I would really appreciate a solution that re-enables the keywords behaviour from all previous versions of Lightroom into Lightroom 4.

I have the exact same use case as Jason which worked in Lightroom 3. I use full names for keywords and list first names and nick names as synonyms and then only export the synonyms. Please restore this behavior from Lightroom 3.

Proposal: Don’t make ‘Include on Export’ and ‘Export Synonyms’ mutually exclusive.

+1