Editing the Keyword List

My keyword list is a mess. Partly hierarchical, partly not (for example, “robin” might appear alone, or as “robin < bird”. I also have a lot of “junk” keywords that I think showed up after importing photos from others, as well as inadvertent synonyms (“bird” and “birds”). It really needs serious editing, but PL6 just gives me a very small window and no clear way to, say, replace “birds” with “bird” in all photos with the keyword “birds”.

Is there a better way to edit the keyword list that I am just missing? A tutorial somewhere? Or some external editor?

Try this:

  • You select all the photos with “birds” and keeping the selection:
  • You remove the keyword “birds”
  • You add the keyword “bird”

Bonne méthode, sans oublier ensuite de supprimer “oiseaux” de la liste des mots-clés.

External editor? Not available
Tutorial? Check out this site: Metadata Use Cases - TuTo DxO
A better way? Edit things in the keyword list. Add keywords by using the keyword list instead of typing, which can produce all sorts of mis-spelled variants. Otherwise, follow @Franky 's advice.

Fixing a messed-up keyword list is hard to do in PhotoLab. If you have some other keywording tool like Lightroom, photo mechanic etc., you might fix the keywords in that app and then re-index the photo archive, be it from scratch (delete the DB before re-indexing) or with the existing DB unchanged, the latter way will duplicate the list of images though. Make sure you have a fresh backup and settings+metadata files updated in order to reduce the risk of major losses.

Thanks to all. I decided to just grin and bear it with fixing it in PhotoLab. It’s going to take some time, but I’m retired…

1 Like

I have gone through this pain in the past. Not retired yet (but looking forward to it).
I discovered the best way of doing this is to get your structure printed out as a record, and to write out what you want to achieve before creating a new structure. That way you give yourself time to carefully critique your new system before making mistakes again and you have a record of what you had so you can then follow @Franky 's advice.
Best of luck