A new plug-in is bubbling – jb Keyword Tools. It’s aimed at those who use controlled vocabularies of keywords, and also at event shooters who use keywords to organise their workflows. It’s a bit like a bigger version of Lightroom’s Keywording panel, but with the access to external files that makes PhotoMechanic’s “Code Replacement” or iView’s vocabulary files features so popular.
The concept is that you initially prepare one or more keyword vocabularies – tab delimited text files. The format of the file is important – tab-delimited text, UTF-8 encoding, and on Mac the line endings must be standard Unix. These are dead easy to create in Excel and I’m finding it handy to store them on Dropbox so they can be accessed from any computer.
When you’re doing your keywording, you call a menu command and are prompted to load a vocabulary file. This has one button for each line in the vocabulary, so here I used a file of keywords about owls (bird lovers please don’t shoot me – I know next to nothing about owls). Click a button and the keywords is added to the catalogue and applied to the current image – or to all selected images if AutoSync is ticked. A single button can easily add more than one keyword at once – each line of your keyword vocabulary file would have a number of tab-separated entries like “Verreaux’s Eagle Owl {TAB} Owls….”
It’s not really working with existing hierarchies – yet. However, I’ll see if I can do something – eg picking up a “>” symbol – but that requires parsing the existing keyword hierarchy which is extremely / impossibly slow in LR3 on Windows. I recommend you use either a flat keyword list or use Put New Keywords Inside This Keyword to set up a top level keyword, and all the new keywords will be added inside it.
This last point is particularly relevant as one of the original thoughts was for photographers who shoot events where they can create lists of participants. Imagine photographing a horse race and pulling together a 4 column spreadsheet of the number, horse name, rider, owner, which you save as a tab-delimited file. You then click button 55* (* indicates more than one keyword is in there) and all four keywords are added to the picture. An alternative example might be a list of attendees at a wedding – names may be in column 1, while the next column could have “Bride’s side”, “His work colleagues”, “Kids” etc. Again, click the person’s name and the other words get added. So yes at its simplest it’s like a big keywording panel, but it can do quite a bit more.
Other main feature
Also in the plug-in is an Export option to split up an export by keywords. In the Export dialog, you specify a top level keyword and the plug-in will then make extra export copies of the files – one per child keyword – and put them in a folder structure that matches the keyword. So going back to the above examples, you can export JPEGs with one folder per horse, or for each group in a wedding shoot.
It’s currently a regular export, so you select the items, start an export and choose “Split Export by Keywords” from the Export To drop-down box. Then enter the name of the top level keyword whose family you want to replicate as folders. You must enter this (though I don’t think I’ve put anything in there to force you to do so or fall over gently if you don’t). Currently it will look 10 levels down, so if your top level is Weddings and you’ve selected images from the Beardsworth wedding (just joking) which is keyworded as a child of Weddings, then you’ve still 9 to go.
Also, it only uses those keywords which have been explicitly applied. So using bold to show the actual tagging of an image, Weddings/Beardsworth/Friends/Laura will result in copies being placed in the Beardsworth and Laura folders, but not in Weddings itself or in Friends.
The plug-in first exports files to a subfolder – these are the “first copies” which you can delete. I prefer not to do so because it’s possible your export will include images that aren’t actually keyworded. But you can also create symbolic links, if you want.
Anyone interested?
Fancy trying it? OK, here’s the plug-in (limited to 10 items) and various example vocabulary files. See the previous post for the thinking behind the plug-in but these bits are new:
