I could be interested to my whole photo library into DxO. But I have a whole set of hierarchical keywords already linked to thousands of pictures. How can I import these keywords into PhotoLab 5 together with my library ?
Thanks for your help
Gérard
The current way to import all your keywords is to make PhotoLab index the photo archive. Click on the archive button at the upper end of the left sidebar in Library view, select your archive’s top folder and wait until finished…
Depending on how many items are in your archive, the process takes quite a while to finish, possibly several hours. Make sure that keywords are in their files or .xmp sidecars.
A keyword list importer would be handy, but it would not automatically connect the keywords to their files.
Please note that this has been requested before. Search for keyword import in the feature request category to find those proposals. Add your vote(s) too.
@GerardB
There are a lot of different vocabularies out there both flat and hierarchic as flat textfiles or tab separated text and it’s far from just Lightrooms.
I tried to import a Lightroom-list to PhotoMechanic which worked fine. PM Plus which is my metadata- and image archive has a nice import-/exportinterface but I dropped it of a number of reasons.
For the first I found the maintainance of the list was pretty cumbersome and it was fare from as efficient as just the basic flat keyword list in the application that is built automatically when you enter keywords by yourselves.
I also found that PM and Photolab handles structured keywords differently and if you start to update from two directions bidirectionally you will soon create a real mess you won’t like at all. So I found quickly that flat keywords was the way to go for me and strictly letting PM own the metadata.
I don’t know how well the metadata exchange between Photolab and Lightroom works today but if you would like to migrate at least three conditions have to be met. Photolab has to handle structured keywords exaxtly the same way as Lightroom.
You also have to be able to import AND export the keywordlist preferably to a tabseparated file. I found it very much more efficient to export the keywords and maintain the structures in a texteditor than through the PM keyword interface.
Photolab also has to be developed to secure that the metadata doesn’t get updated from two directions by mistake or poor knowledge of these conditions. Bidirectional metadata flows ought to be avoided. Today I don’t think Photolab is ready really for migration. It lacks quite a few tools but it works find to get PL to import, index and build flat keywordlists automatically from the PM XMP-metadatafiles.
I import the data even to Photolab despite PM owns it in order to use it for searches in Photolibrary.
The good thing though is that the metadata flow from PM works perfectly fine to Photolab and PL doesn’t mess with the XMP at JPEG exports if you don’t so don’t if you happen to use PM Plus and Photolab together.