How to Fix Keyword Libraries?
Keywords belong to the most important "adjustmants" ever. Capture One offers the possibility to add user defined keyword libraries. So far so fine.
A know problem is working with theese libs. If you add a new keyword hierarchically, it could happen that you (later) find a new "group" to move this keyword to. An example:
New keyword is "Traunsee" the name of a lake in Oberösterreich which is a part of Austria. The hierachy is at this moment:
Austria
Oberösterreich
Traunsee
Later there were added more other locations, all located in a area within Oberösterreich named "Salzkammergut". New hierachy should be:
Austria
Oberösterreich
Salzkammergut
Attersee
Traunsee
Gmunden
Mondsee
Dachstein
Totes Gebirge
You have to move Traunsee into/under "Salzkammergut". This is possible. The upcoming Problem is that all selected items are moved together AND selecetd items are not automatically deselected when changing the focus to another item. So it happens sometimes that items from other categories are moved together unwanted too. AND there is no undo.
Another way to go is to create "Traunsee" at the new place additionally and delete it at the old place in the hierarchy. But then you delete previously tagged "Traunsee" out of older images' metadatas. And, of course, the problem with deleting "randomly" selected other keywords too is similiar with problem I mentioned above when moving keywords.
Third try: You create different keyword libraries ("places", "names", "animals" and more) seperately in and editor and later import them into Capture One. First time works perfectly. From second import on this procedere will add new keywords to the existing lib(s) logically.
So you have to do editing within Capture One. And when you did a fault there is no way back to the status before. To import again will add only but leave faulty items at the faulty place. Deleting libraries to import from scratch will delete the keywords out of metadatas of the tagged images.
Does anybody see a successfull way to solve this Gordian knot?
Kind regards
Ernst
P.S.: Additional question: Is there a way to delete all unused keywords in a library?
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A while ago I imported about 35,000 images from a Lightroom library into Capture One. Then I decided to fix the chaotic keywords (created in Lightroom) in Capture One. Bottom line: fixing keywords in Capture One is a NIGHTMARE.
Moving keywords within hierarchies can cause odd results, as the original poster mentioned. Different versions of a keyword appear to be mysteriously linked, so if you have 3 different versions of one, like Colour, colour, Art > colour, deleting one of them can delete the others. Worse, it will sometimes delete the entire parent category of one or all of the other keywords as well.
Here's how I now work with keywords:
1. I have Capture One set up to prompt for a backup each time I close it. Whenever I do a bit of keyword work, I shut down Capture One, do a backup, then keep track in a log file of the backups and a description of what work I did. Luckily the backup doesn't take that long.
2. I restart Capture One and see what happened. Many times I have had to restore a previous backup because entire chunks of the keyword hierarchy disappeared. You really have to shut down and restart the application; things happen...
I've found something that works, but it is supremely annoying that I have to do it this way.
I use a lot of colour keywords, so that I can find images that are predominantly blue or red for example. Colour keywords were all over the place: partly due to sloppy work and partly due to Capture One moving them into odd hierarchies as I tried to fix other keywords. (I have no idea why "blue" all of a sudden showed up as "animal > bird > blue".) My goal was a single "colour" parent with all individual colours underneath..
After many failed attempts, here's the procedure that finally worked for me:
- Create a user album for each colour for which I want to have a keyword. (blue, green, red)
- Find images with each (badly organized) colour keyword and put them into the appropriate album (all images keyworded with some form of the "blue" keyword go into the "blue" album.
- Delete all the colour keywords from the keyword library, including any parents if the only thing inside the parent was a colour keyword.
- Shutdown Capture One, doing a backup.
- Restart Capture One, confirm all keywords gone and images still in the albums.
- Create the keyword hierarchy: colour > blue, colour > green, colour > red, etc.
- Select one of the colour albums and assign the corresponding keyword. Repeat as necessary.
- Shutdown and restart Capture one and verify things (because at this point I have no confidence in how Capture One deals with keywords.)
In spite of this, somewhere along the line the "yellow" keyword completely disappeared, so no images are tagged with it.
I wouldn't be putting up with all this except that otherwise I think Capture One is a great piece of software.
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Harry,
How would you have fixed the chaotic keywords in Lightroom?
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It's been several months since I've used Lightroom, but I don't remember having any problems with reorganizing keywords.
I've just opened Lightroom and did a few tests to confirm that it is indeed working the way I remember it.
When I click a keyword in the "Keyword List" panel and drag it to another parent, it worked as you would expect. Only the keyword itself moved, and it didn't drag along its parent or otherwise reorganize the hierarchy. Capture One does (inexplicable?) things with parent keywords. (There is another post somewhere that explains how Capture One deals with keywords that are moved within a hierarchy, but I find the behaviour is entirely counterintuitive, and I'm not convinced Capture One behaves as the post describes.)
If there are two versions of a keyword, e.g. "animal > cat" and "cat", and you delete one of those in Lightroom, the other keyword does not also get deleted, which I'm pretty sure can be the case in Capture One.
Lastly, you can delete a parent in the keyword list without Lightroom deleting all instances of that keyword:
Animal > Mammal > Cat
Mammal > Cat
In Lightroom, if you delete the Mammal at the root level, the Animal > Mammal remains. I am quite sure that this isn't (always) the case in Capture One.
I think there is an explanation for this. Capture One started off with a much more targetted audience and was session based. If I'm doing a product shoot and all photos are in a dedication session, I might use some keywords within that session, but it certainly wouldn't be a complex hierarchy. I'd probably also have no reason to reorganize the keywords. Now that you can have (large) catalogues in Capture One, I think the keywording logic hasn't kept pace.
Another post dealing with keywords simply said "Don't use keyword hierarchies in Capture One."
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There are differences in design concept between C1 and LR as I understand things.
If one has imported for LR what was there will have been interpreted and may well give different results simply because the apparent hierarchy is of stand alone keywords connected in a different way.
The changes to the KW system arrived after Catalogs were introduced - or perhaps at the same time?
The are not, so far as I recall, a legacy of what was available previously although of course backwards compatibility had to be maintained.
So far as I remember you are correct that if you remove the Top level of a hierarchy the entire Hierarchy will disappear. That seem logical to me. Remove a level and all the links below it will no longer exist.
Similarly inserting a level in an existing hierarchy requires some decision to be made in respect of legacy records.
This is typical for any database data structure.
There may be a case for a specific KW changes editing tool but then there are several ways that KWs can be a selected (e.g. multiple "libraries" ) that covering all of them could be quite a challenge.
I will read and digest you process soon but have to deal with some other matters before the end of the day so cannot do so right now.
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