Keywords Manager
Plugin
Lightroom Classic, Windows only
Bilingual: Spanish / English
V 2
Keywords Manager helps you get the most out of Lightroom Classic’s keywording system. Hierarchical keyword structures are one of Lightroom’s most powerful cataloging features, as they allow you to organize photos logically, distinguish between keywords with the same name based on their position within the hierarchy, and perform more precise searches and filtering. However, Lightroom provides very limited tools for managing keyword hierarchies. This plugin fills that gap by providing fast, intuitive tools to reorganize, clean up, and maintain your keyword structure, making large catalogs much easier to manage.
Key Features
Features for organizing the hierarchical keyword tree:
- Move keywords to any location within the hierarchical tree.
- Create new keywords exactly where they belong within the hierarchy.
- Edit keyword names, synonyms, and export options.
- Merge duplicate or similar keywords, automatically assigning all associated photos, synonyms, and child keywords to the keyword that is retained.
- Find similar keywords to detect duplicates and spelling errors, and then merge them.
- Delete unwanted keywords from the catalog without losing control over the cleanup process.
- View and explore the photos associated with any keyword.
- Move, add, or remove keyword assignments between photos directly from the plugin.
Features for generating collections based on keywords:
- From a selection of photos, generates collections by keyword to include those photos. A typical use case is after completing a photographic trip, when we have thousands of photos of, for example, different bird species to which we have added the corresponding keyword. Organizing our catalog and workflow becomes easier if we generate a collection for each of the bird species photographed.
- Unlike smart collections, generated collections allow you to sort photos, add or remove photos, and perform all the operations available for standard collections. Lightroom's smart collections have very limited filtering capabilities that can confuse keywords with similar names or keywords located in different parts of the keyword tree.
- Two ways to generate collections: flat structure (all new collections are created within the same collection set) or recreate the hierarchical structure (collections and collection sets are created to reproduce the same hierarchical relationships as the keywords).
- Allows you to select which keywords to generate an associated collection for.
- Allows you to update the contents of previously generated collections.
The plugin’s main screen is organized as a two-pane explorer, with the keyword hierarchy displayed in each pane. For example, the user can select the keywords they want to move in one pane and the destination keyword in the other, then click MOVE to make the selected keywords part of the destination keyword’s hierarchy. Alternatively, they can click MERGE, and all photos assigned to the keywords selected in the first pane will be reassigned to the keyword selected in the second pane, while the keywords selected in the first pane will be deleted. This is particularly useful when multiple keywords with similar names or typos have been created, for example, “aves”, “ave”, and “avess”, and the user wants to consolidate them into a single keyword, “ave”. The plugin also allows the user to select a keyword in one pane and automatically find keywords with similar names in the other. Continuing with the same example, the user can select “aves” in one pane and click FIND SIMILAR, and the plugin will select “ave” and “aves” in the other pane, allowing the user to then merge them or perform any other desired action.
It is also possible to select two keywords and open a panel that allows you to explore the photos associated with each one, again in a two-pane window. From there, you can move or add photos from one keyword to the other, or remove the keyword from selected photos. In the example shown, the left pane displays the photos associated with the keyword… “atardecer” y a la dereche se muestran las fotos correspondientes al keyword “aves”.
After a trip, you may come home with thousands of photos. Selecting and editing them becomes much easier when they are neatly organized into collections based on the keywords you assigned. Simply add the appropriate keywords to your photos, and the plugin quickly builds all the corresponding collections for you. Just choose which keywords should have their own collection and where to create them.
