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Child Keyword Entry Tip
While helping a Lightroom user online recently, I discovered a keywording shortcut that I have never seen mentioned anywhere.
The user had a combination of personal and stock keywords all jumbled, and was asking for organizational advice. I described the hierarchal system that Lightroom is capable of, and recommended starting with a simple top-level of Personal and Stock.
Once he got that organized, his next question was, "I'm able to create new keywords simultaneously as I apply them to photos, simply by typing in the 'Click here to add keywords' text box. Since most of my new keywords are for the Stock category, is there some way to have those new keywords default to a given parent keyword?"
I didn't think so; in my experience, you have to create the keyword 'within' a parent keyword to begin with, or drag it there later. However, in the course of experimenting, I found something interesting.
If I were to apply the new keyword puppy to a photo, it appeared as a top level keyword, as expected. However, if I applied the new keyword as puppy > Stock, it was created as a child of the Stock parent keyword.
I knew that this is Lightroom's way of distinguishing between existing keywords with multiple locations in the hierarchy, e.g. horse > animal and horse > sports. It was news to me that you could use a similar method to create child keywords in one step.
Logical, but to me, totally unexpected.
In late-breaking news, Inside Lightroom colleague, Gene McCullagh, just dropped me a line with a little more info on the topic; have a peek at Gene's blog, Lightroom Secrets.
Using > to create hierarchies on the fly is great, but it does have the potential downside of creating duplicate keywords. If a little self-promotion is appropriate, I've written up a tip for identifying and dealing with duplicate keywords created through this method. It involves a little tinkering and some command-line comfort, but works well.
Alan, thanks for the input. The contribution is fine, we're all here to learn. Maybe it's just me, but I'm having trouble getting the link to work. Perhaps post it in clear text for those of us interested.
Thanks, Brad. I think the software is filtering the href out of tags. In plain text, here's the URL for my writeup of handling dupe keywords:
http://www.schussman.com/article/dealing-with-duplicate-keywords-in-lightroom-2
Great tips! Thanks!
The ">" sign is indeed a great way of generating hierarchical keywords on the fly, however Alan is absolutely right about the duplicate keywords issue. I run into that all the time. I don't know where I found out about this trick but indeed you almost never see it mentioned, so great idea to mention it! I am sure lots of people will benefit.
If you don't want to create the hierarchy immediately, Lightroom 2 also has a feature that allows you to specify under which keyword new keywords will be placed. This can be used, for example, to create a kind of "In Box" for new keywords as you enter them in the keyword field but have not yet specified a hierarchy.
To use this, right-click on a keyword in the Keyword List panel and select the "Put New Keywords Inside this Keyword" item. The selected parent keyword will be marked in the panel with a dot to the right of the keyword name.
Thanks, Troy. I guess my eyes have glazed over that option about a million times, while clicking on 'Create Keyword Tag inside ....'
Well, there's the solution the original poster needed, way back at the start of our discussion.
Something new to learn every day!