For this week’s blog, I was going to write about the changes that have happened to Lightroom in the last week. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought I should just focus on one issue. It is something that was totally ignored in this new release. Not only that, but it has been totally ignored since the earliest beta versions of Lightroom TEN years ago. We need better keyword support in Lightroom.
I posted about this on Adobe’s support/suggestions forum – you can see my post here: https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/please-can-we-have-improved-keywording-support-weve-been-asking-for-ten-years – within 3 minutes of posting the post was ‘merged’ into page three of a seven-year-old post on the same site. That’s really going to make it easy for people to see these suggestions! It’s the digital equivalent of filing it “in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”( to quote Douglas Adams).
[UPDATE 25 Oct 2017: The above link goes to the original post that I made. Here’s the link to the thread it was merged in to: https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/better_keyword_management?topic-reply-list%5Bsettings%5D%5Bfilter_by%5D=all&topic-reply-list%5Bsettings%5D%5Breply_id%5D=19039205#reply_19039205 – Some people have been upvoting my suggestion. Please upvote on the merged thread as I believe that is the one that Adobe is looking at for votes. As far as I can tell any votes on my original thread won’t get seen or counted]
There is no easy way to send this to Adobe – so I’m writing an open letter, and I’m going to tweet about it and share it – tagging Adobe as much as I can, with the hope that it will go viral and the somehow, the powers that be will see it and after TEN years will start to take notice.
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Dear Adobe,
It has been raised many times before, but Lightroom needs better keywording support. As a professional photographer here’s what we need. There’s TEN of them – one for each year we have been waiting for improvements.
- We need an easy way to combine/merge keywords – yes it is possible at the moment but it is convoluted.
- We need to be able to cut and paste keywords in the keyword list hierarchy, dragging them around doesn’t really work when you have 10,000+ keywords in your list (as I have)
- For stock photographers, we need the ability to change the order of the keywords to put the most relevant keywords first on export.
- We need the ability to prevent ‘third party’ images or images which haven’t been exported with keywords in a hierarchy from creating new keywords in the wrong places on import.
- We need the ability to filter on synonyms as well as master keywords. Many-a-time, I have needlessly created a new keyword because I had forgotten the one I wanted was a synonym for a different keyword
- Autocomplete should autocomplete on synonyms and then replace with the keyword it is a synonym for. Again we can’t always remember which is the ‘master’ and which is the synonym.
- We need to be able to filter for keywords with spaces in the name if I want to filter for “Tower Bridge” I want to see just the “Tower Bridge” keyword, not the keyword for every bridge and every tower that I have created.
- Keyword sets should not be limited to 9 keywords each. It makes no sense. Allowing those sets to be of variable length would make a huge improvement to the speed in which we can keyword.
- We need the ability to work in a larger panel with larger fonts. Managing keywords and metadata in a small side panel with tiny fonts is difficult on the eyes. Many of us actually spend more time doing keywording and metadata than we do developing our images.
- We need to be able to do keywording in on our mobile devices AND have it sync back to LR Classic. It’s just crazy that it’s now available there but doesn’t sync. We should have our LR keyword list available to us on the mobile devices. Some of us have spent years building up custom taxonomies to support our business.
Getting any one of these fixed would make a real difference to professional photographers around the world. LR is 10 years old – some of us, myself included, were raising many of these keywording issues when we were beta testing LR version 1 and TEN YEARS later there has been no improvement.
I had really hoped that we could have seen at least some progress by this stage. I am truly disappointed in Adobe on this one.
Yours,
Ian M Butterfield,
Photographer, photography trainer,
Lightroom trainer and general Lightroom advocate.
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Do you agree with me? If you do please tweet this blog, or share it on Facebook, and when you do please tag either Adobe or some of the Lightroom influencers who have Adobe’s ear. Let’s make sure that Adobe knows what their customers need.
And finally a PS to Adobe – if you read this, and plan to take action, please let me know. I’d love to be able to tell people you are listening.
[UPDATE 25 Oct 2017: Thank you to everyone who has responded to this blog post over the last few days. I know it has been mentioned on a number of forums. Please keep tweeting it and posting links to, let’s try and get Adobe to take notice]
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That is one of the reason, why I do not work with LR.
I did so, but I found it too slow and had not enough power for my needs.
I work with another DAM-product, calls IMatch (photools.com).
I have tried a lot of DAMs, IMatch was the best for me.
The support is great, not like with Adobe.
If I have a problem, the community and mostly the programmer does answer, and very often, if an idea makes sense, he will change or add it.
My editing for Raws (nef) I do with Photoshop. All managing stuff I do with IMatch.
I am a professional photographer and I am nothing to do with this software, except that I am also on its community in a forum for users.
I agree with the comments about IMatch. While it’s in no sense an image EDITOR like Photoshop, it is unequalled for its amazing power to manage digital assets (not JUST photos, but everything!), and the support provided by the develop and the international community of users is unsurpassed. HIGHLY recommended. . .
Definitely – IMatch (https://www.photools.com/) is the bees knees. Extremely capable, infinitely customizable, and best supported software I have ever used. The only one in the same class for support is xyplorer – if you excuse the off-topic. ( https://www.xyplorer.com/ ) Both from Germany. Is it something about the Germans? :-)
About 8 or 9 years ago I used to use IMATCH, but in the end, I moved over to Lightroom. There was a very long delay in producing what was referred to at the time as IMATCH NG (Next Generation) and as it was a ‘one man band’ set-up, I became concerned that it would never see the light of day.
In the end, I jumped ship to Lightroom as my DAM partly because I could do all my editing from there and I didn’t need to have both DNG and processed images as separate files.
It is good to know it is still around, and know that it is there if I decide to jump ship the other way. At the moment, however, I’ll just keep harassing ADOBE and hope they aren’t trying to kill off LR as a desktop product.
Ian can you also start a campaign around the termination of stand-alone Lightroom?
Karl Reed
I hate paying for software on subscription. But I fear the horse has already bolted on that one. And to be fair to Adobe, they did say when LR6 first came out that it would be the last non-subscription version. I think me starting a campaign on that topic would do more harm than good. I sold out. I pay my £50 (GBP) every month, because I can’t buy stand alone InDesign or Premiere, and photoshop and LR come bundled in. I begrudge paying it. They would have to make all four products stand alone for me to switch back. Sadly that isn’t going to happen.
Start your own campaign and let me know and I’ll happily tweet and share your posts about it.
@Ian
Hi, Mario here, from photools.com.
Your open letter has been mentioned in the IMatch community (https://www.photools.com/community) yesterday and this is probably why you’ve got so many ‘fanboy’ posts above. I apologize ;-)
Yes, IMatch is still around, and better than ever, thank you.
IMatch 2017 was released in June, and the add-on IMatch Anywhere™ now enables you to access your IMatch database from any device and platform, including Mac, iOS, Linux, Windows or Android.
photools.com is still an one man show, but I work really hard to make my users _independent_ from IMatch. I’m a sticker for standards and open system concepts. No customer lock-in, no subscriptions. My users can switch to another DAM at any time and all their data travels with them. This is very important for me.
I’ve read your letter above and I can proudly say, everything you request has already been implemented in IMatch. For many years. It’s just that not many people know about IMatch. Adobe spends 150 million US$ per year on marketing – hard to come up against that…
Adding keywords to files is a mandatory but unfortunately rather tedious and boring task. Hence I tried to make it quick and painless.
The Keyword Panel in IMatch has been designed to allow users to quickly add/edit keywords to large batches of files. With proper thesaurus support, controlled vocabularies, spell checking, synonyms, auto-suggestions, visual quality control and a minimal potential for error. Soon ‘A.I. support’ as well. The unique @Keywords category feature allows you to add/change/replace keywords for any number of files with a simple drag & drop, while visualizing your keyword hierarchy at the same time.
See, for example, these two articles:
Controlled Vocabularies in IMatch: https://www.photools.com/4588/free-controlled-vocabularies-imatch/
Visual clues for quality control: https://www.photools.com/3594/visual-clues-improve-workflow/
to get an impression of how IMatch 2017 improves your keywording and captioning workflow. With whatever image/RAW editor you prefer!
Note: I’m not trying to sell you anything (although there is currently a 20% rebate for users with an IMatch 3 license). If this post is against your netiquette, please feel free to remove it and to contact me at ‘support a-t photools.com’ to give me a telling-off.
I use my own software every day to work with my own images. And I actively listen to my users and discuss DAM-related topics with them every day – via email, the community and in person. I perfectly know what you are talking about.
Oh, and I use Lightroom and Photoshop and also Affinity products. But for DAM, I use only IMatch.
Hi Mario,
Great to hear from you – I have absolutely no problems with you posting here! I know that most of the keywording features I’m requesting of Adobe are in IMatch – as a former user, it was the benchmark against which I judge LR’s wholly inadequate keywording capabilities. If LR gets so dumbed down as to be unusable for a professional then IMatch is probably the direction I will look. What I like about LR is that is a whole workflow tool – DAM and RAW processor. Unfortunately, the problem with is that it is both DAM and RAW processor, and thus it isn’t “best-in-field” in either area.
I know IMatch can manage DNG/RAW files but what I like about LR is that I don’t need to have both RAW and processed image in the DAM – it keeps it clean and I can keep tweaking my processing when I need to. I’m sure if I had to I could develop a workflow with IMatch – shouldn’t be too difficult, I used to use it every day, I even wrote macros/plug-ins (can’t remember the IMatch term for them) to manage my workflow – many of those I really miss.
Ian.
Ah, I think, I can remember you, Ian.
You means scripts, I think, what you wrote for IMatch.
About one-man-show: Yes, Mario is a one-man-show, but as we can see in many examples, this must not be a bad thing.
Big companies can also stop a product, even if it is very good, but from a point of economical view.
A big company must not really look after some users with problems.
But a very small company has to look for each user, the the problems or ideas for real and tries to offer a solution.
Hence I am really happy since I am with IMatch. Before I worked some monthes with LR and with Portfolio. Specialy the last one was very good, but the better is the enemy of the good. :-) So I am still with IMatch.
I wish you good success with your “open letter” to Adobe, and I hope, you get an answer from Adobe.
How do you manage your InDesign-files in Lightroom?
Winfried,
I don’t manage my InDesign files in LR – I do however manage the images that are (potentially) going into an InDesign project by pulling them together into a collection.
Ian.
Quote: “I know IMatch can manage DNG/RAW files but what I like about LR is that I don’t need to have both RAW and processed image in the DAM – it keeps it clean and I can keep tweaking my processing when I need to.”
That’s free for you to decide.
Most users prefer to manage both the RAW/DNG (master) and all derivative images (versions) in IMatch – because that way IMatch can keep track of everything and automatically manage metadata propagation (You make a metadata change to the master and IMatch copies that to all versions, applying your rules). IMatch offers “version stacking”, which means that you can collapse all versions ‘under’ the master to reduce the clutter with a single click. Other users prefer only to manage the JPEG created from the RAW in IMatch and keep the original file as a digital negative on backup somewhere.
Whatever works for you is good. IMatch is flexible enough to adapt to your workflow, not the other way round.
RAW/DNG files are only part of the files which make up my projects. There are also PSD and InDesign (or, now, Affinity Designer) files, videos, audio files. Often Office or PDF files with notes, legal stuff, bills. IMatch allows me to keep track of all this, search across all files etc. This can be a big advantage over a software which only manages selected image formats.
The old IMatch versions used a BASIC programming language.
Now you can write IMatch ‘apps’ using standard JavaScript and HTML. Very powerful and flexible – many people know a bit of HTML these days. You can also access your IMatch database from programming languages like Java, Python, .NET, PHP and even Windows PowerShell. This makes it very easy to automate stuff “from the outside” or to integrate IMatch and IMatch WebServices with other software.