Better Keyword Management

I have a large list of Keywords that is not ordered. I added a Keyword named People and will eventually move all people I have named there. The same goes for Animals, Places, etc. etc.

I find it pretty cumbersome and a slow process to drag each Keyword through the long list with a lot of slow scrolling and finally dropping it at its parent Keyword. If I at least could enlarge the keyword list it would save me plenty of time. ( Maybee there is a way to enlarge the list window, but I don’t know it and have not found it…)

No way to enlarge this window, there are several requests to modify the palettes (especially that of the keywords) but no feedback from DxO.

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Olaf, don’t forget to vote for your proposal.

Until the request has been implemented, you could change monitor settings to make the list bigger and easier to modify. Nevertheless, I’d also welcome a possibility to import a keyword list, e.g. from Lightroom or any other app that can export their keyword lists.

Depending on how many root keywords you’ll have and the depth of the list, you could modify sidecar files to make DPL import the modded keywords - which will not be less of an effort.

You can also:

  • create the new keyword in its final location
  • select all files with the old keyword
  • change the keyword in the selected files

That should work right ?

Example, starting out with DPL that is set to NOT synchronise metadata:

  1. Take a RAW image, add A>B>C>D in the keyword field, hit ENTER
  2. Export metadata to get an initial XMP sidecar
  3. Edit in the lr:hierarchicalSubject section like shown below
  4. Make DPL read metadata
         <lr:hierarchicalSubject>
            <rdf:Bag>
               <rdf:li>Animal|Mammal|Bear|Black Bear</rdf:li>
               <rdf:li>Animal|Mammal|Bear|Brown Bear</rdf:li>
               <rdf:li>Animal|Mammal|Bear|Grizzly</rdf:li>
               <rdf:li>Animal|Mammal|Bear|Kodiak</rdf:li>
               <rdf:li>Animal|Mammal|Bear|Polar Bear</rdf:li>
               <rdf:li>Animal|Mammal|Goat|Billygoat</rdf:li>
               <rdf:li>Animal|Mammal|Goat|Nannygoat</rdf:li>
            </rdf:Bag>
         </lr:hierarchicalSubject>

Notes

  • I’ve deleted the section of dc:Subject
  • you can use a single image and XMP file and repeat steps 3 and 4 again and again
  • this method is for importing only, the list must be done manually anyway…

Even the rudimentary keyword management in XnView is better than what we currently have in PL…

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Here is the keyword manager from my app…

Add keywords to the right column and then drag them to the left to create hierarchies.

Select a row on the right and press the spacebar to see a Quicklook panel with previews of all images that contain the selected keyword.

Double-click on a row in the left column to add the keyword and its hierarchy to the keywords entry field in the main window.

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And yet for all of that, a UI such as this is/can be a lot more useful.

And the ability to create/use/export templates for keywords and IPTC entries is soooooo valuable

I agree with you, I use XNViewMP for everything that PL doesn’t do or does less well :slightly_smiling_face:

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I just tried XNViewMP to try to add keywords to an image.

It took me ages to find how to access the keywords dialog, only to find I had to look under IPTC-IIM, which is deemed to be obsolete.

I decided to try entering a hierarchy “Animal > Mammal > Bear > Black Bear”…

When I hit the Write button I found that my changes got written directly to the RAW file and not to a sidecar…

[XMP]           Subject                         : Animal > Mammal > Bear > Black Bear
[XMP]           Hierarchical Subject            : Animal > Mammal > Bear > Black Bear

Totally wrong!!!

Eventually I found the settings dialog and changed a couple of setting in the hope of writing to sidecars and, in so doing, I found the list of permitted hierarchy delimiters.

Even with the setting to write to XMP sidecars supposedly set, I got an XMP sidecar produced but it didn’t contain any keywords - this continued to be written to the RAW file.

I have to say this is one truly awful piece of software, with all sorts of flaky behaviour like when it keeps on opening an image when right-clicking unless I hold down the right mouse button until I find the menu item I want.

And as for implying that XMP tags were being written to now obsolete IPTC-IIM - This is a product I would certainly never recommend.

To transform a flat list of keywords into a collection of sensible hierarchical structures still takes

  • some thinking and
  • manual “labour”

No current tool can save us from having to do that stuff.

But there might be easier tools than PL for the job.

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You app looks like a big improvement to what I see in PhotoLab…