Keyword order

[loweskid]

There was a discussion on the Alamy (photo agency) forum about keyword order - Lightroom forces keywords into alphabetical order and someone was asking if it's possible to stop it doing this (apparently, it's not).  I've always assumed IMatch displayed keywords in the order in which I enter them but I when I compared an image in both IMatch and Bridge I noticed slight differences.  Further investigation within the IMatch metadata panel shows a difference between what's shown in the 'Core Data' panel and the 'ITPC ApplicationRecord' (see image).  The ITPC Record is what is displayed in Bridge.

I think I may have done a 'write back' then added more keywords later - could this cause the different order?

This isn't important - I'm just curious.

[Mario]

There is no standard for how keywords are ordered. Or not. Many years ago there were some systems who tried to figure out "more important" keywords, which were supposed to come "first". But since there is no standard and different applications treat this differently...and there is not really a need, because you can always use hierarchical keywords and put some under a parent like "MAIN" or "IMPORTANT_KEYWORDS" to somehow assign additional meaning to your keywords. But, frankly, keywords are just a bag of words.

IMatch maintains order keyword for hierarchical keywords, but not necessarily for flat keywords.
(There is also an option to sort keywords alphabetically for display in the keyword panel!)

Certain operations may shuffle keyword order. For example mapping between flat and hierarchical keywords (your IPTC (or IPTCCore?) keywords are flat keywords and are not necessarily 1:1 to the hierarchical keywords, depending on your mapping settings). Looking up keywords in the thesaurus and adding missing elements to form hierarchical keywords from flat keywords is another operation which may shuffle keywords around, because elements are added or removed due to group and exclusion settings. I also thing that ExifTool sometimes re-arranges keyword order. I have never really analyzed this.

[loweskid]

Thanks for the quick reply.  This all stems from the fact that with Alamy we can select up to 10 keywords as 'supertags' but the Alamy interface is a pain to use so it might make things easier if the 'supertags' are entered first - but this can't be done in Lightroom.

I came across this thread, started 5 years ago, where people were asking Adobe to allow custom sort order in Lightroom...

[page]=1#topic-reply-list]https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/lightroom_keyword_re_ordering_is_a_huge_problem?topic-reply-list[settings][page]=1#topic-reply-list

5 years and still not implemented - compare that with IMatch support..!  According to that thread some other photo agencies recommend prioritising the keyword sort order, including Adobe's own stock library..!!

I've been having a play with the 'Notes' app. If there is already something in the Description field this shows up in the app.  If I highlight a word in the app I can drag it around and drop it in another position and this is reflected in the metadata panel.  I was wondering how easy it would be to implement such a feature for Keywords.  I'm not sure if it's worth spending much time on it but if it didn't involve much work it might be a selling point for people who submit to agencies.

[Mario]

As I said, IMatch retains the sequence of entering for hierarchical keyword, just not necessarily for flat keywords due to many complicated side-effects and conditions.
Why does Alamy not use hierarchical keywords? Or let you allow to priorize keywords globally or per-image? Or reorder keywords? I have never used Alamy so I don't know.

[Jingo]

I've been having a play with the 'Notes' app. If there is already something in the Description field this shows up in the app.  If I highlight a word in the app I can drag it around and drop it in another position and this is reflected in the metadata panel.  I was wondering how easy it would be to implement such a feature for Keywords.  I'm not sure if it's worth spending much time on it but if it didn't involve much work it might be a selling point for people who submit to agencies.

To store what you type in the box as a new keyword is simple to do.. 2 lines of code and you are good to go.  This isn't exactly what you are looking for - but to demonstrate, I include the code in the package below.  I also changed the icon and bkg color to differentiate from the standard notes app. To install, just:

1 - navigate to the C:\ProgramData\photools.com\imatch6\webroot\user  folder
2 - unzip the files

The new App: MyNotes should appear in your app list and anything you type will append to the keywords.  There are NO checks against existing keywords, thesaurus, etc.. it simply takes what you type and adds it as a new keyword...  not ideal but done just to show what is possible via scripting and how to easily change something in the existing code using APPS!

Enjoy! - Andy.

[loweskid]

Thanks Andy, that's great.  Unfortunately, my scripting skills are non-existent but it could be useful 'as is'.  I like the way the keywords jump automatically to the metadata panel.

Mario - Alamy convert hierarchical keywords to flat, maybe because of the way their search engine works. I can prioritize and reorder keywords after uploading; it's just that their online Image Manager is badly designed (in my opinion) and awkward to use so I try to avoid it as much as possible.