Making a case for “ Key-wording” your images!

Here are the key-words associated with this image.

When you start on your life-long journey of discovery many hours, days, weeks, months, years and decades are dedicated on learning and refining the craft however very little if any time is spent on developing work-flow techniques.

Regardless of what genre of photography are you engaged in ‘work-flow’ practices that need can adapt to your current and future needs is critical. Today’s photographic editing softwares are extremely amazing and many of them have incorporated powerful ‘digital asset management (DAM)’ capabilities. Arguably the most popular DAM is Lightroom, but it can either your best friend or worst enemy depending on how you manage your images.

Many novice photographers will simply dump their images from their memory cards into randomly in a folder that is either their internal drive and maybe a single or even multiple external hard-drives. Over time, as experienced photographers we may start moving images into dedicated Folders based on some sort of Calendar Structure or by genre of image.

Over my 20+ years of capturing digital images, I have saved images base on the calendar, only to switch to genre of photography which required me to move existing images to this new structure along with new images. Followed by a regression back to a calendar based Folder structure, and guess what. . . more moving of images. That being said, many years ago I made the decision to stay with a calendar based approach and in doing so, new unforeseen issues appeared.

Over the years, my catalogues have grown as high as 275,000 but through many days and weeks of culling of images, this number has gone down to the current 190,000. I don’t like deleting any images, but that is a discussion for another day.

As many of you know, my wife are both photographers, and we have been fortunate enough to travel a great deal both within Canada as around the world. Many of our foreign trips are done via Cruise Lines. As a result, we have gone to the same Caribbean Islands and European countries, multiple times and in the case of St. Martin, the number is 8 times. As a result, it became obvious to me that I need to have a work-flow that would allow me to look for a specific image quickly and efficiently. If Karen came to me and said, remember when we were in Grand Case for dinner can you pull all the images we might have and by-the-way I only need the ones from 2016, or can you pull together all of our images of Niagara Falls.

This is where “Key-wording” can help out. For every image that I have in my catalogue, I have manually assigned key-words for very specific or personal key-words such as geographic location, people, events or things. I also use a program called Excire Foto which will automatically assign key-words that I would consider as being descriptive in nature such as red dress, water etc.

If you were to Google concept of Key-wording you will see countless posts along with hours of You Tube videos on “How to Key-word”. A foundational concept when Key-wording is that the key-word will either reside in a “Flat” list or in a Hierarchical/Structure list. A “Flat” Key-word list is rather straight forward, it simply means that when you create a key-word in resides in an ever growing list of words that is sorted alphabetically.

A Hierarchical or Structured Key-word List is more complex but more powerful. Think of this like a ‘tree’ with multiple branches. There is a ‘parent key-word’ followed by ‘children key-words’. The number of ‘children key-words’ is only limited by your imagination. For example; I live in Barrie, Ontario, Canada. So the ultimate ‘parent key-word’ is Canada, and within Canada, “Ontario” is a ‘child’ and “Barrie” is a ‘child key-word’ within Ontario. CONCEPT: A key-word can be both a ‘parent key-word’ and ‘child key-word’ depending on where your key-word assignment ends. The last key-word within a branch of key-words is always the ‘child key-word’.

When designing what a Hierarchical or Structure Key-word List might look like consider the concept of creating “BIG BUCKETS” for example;

1.) PEOPLE

2.) PLACES

3.) THINGS

In the example above, “Canada” is ‘child key-word’ within PLACES, and “Ontario” is a ‘child key-word’ within ‘Canada’. “Barrie” is a ‘child key-word’ within “Ontario”. When I assign “Barrie” to the image, all of the preceding key-words up to and including PLACES will be contained in the string. NOTE: I typically do not apply a key-word that would be generic in nature such as ‘red dress’.

Once you have applied a key-word to your image, you will be able to search your entire image catalogue looking for a specific key-word. Within LrClassic, you can filter your images based on a key-word or a several key-words when you use Smart Collections.

I previously mentioned that I also use Excire Foto to apply key-words to my images. The key-words that this application generates are based on AI and as a result it will assign key-words that describe the image rather than a specific label. For example, if I wanted to search my entire image catalogue for images with waterfalls in the image this could be done.

All key-words are stored as Metadata in a .XMP sidecar file location, and as a result they can be read by other applications that read .XMP sidecar files.

CONCLUSION:

If you have any questions about how I approach key-wording of if you want any help just let me know via the “Contact” page on this website.