How to best deal with changes in the Thesaurus

[plastikman]

I am currently building my Thesaurus. This means stuff might still change occasionally until I find the optimal organization. However, changes in the Thesaurus don't update the keywords of the image files themselves. How to deal with this most effectively? I have a feeling I might not doing it right or missing something.

I don't find it efficient to go through all my keywords one by one to apply changes. Ideally, I would remap/relink the keywords automatically with one find and replace action (similar to relocating a missing folder) with maybe a pop-up for keywords with multiple entries. I don't think such an option exists? I looked at Propagate Keywords but it seems to be something different. I would be interested in relinking based on the leaf keywords automatically in these cases.

Another issue is when the People Manager automatically applies keywords, and you later change their hierarchy/organization in the Thesaurus, you have to update every single entry in the People Manager (e.g. instead of People|Gender|Female you decide to name it Attributes|Gender|Female). These create new @Keywords categories etc. causing more pollution.

Sometimes I just feel I should keep my keywords hierarchy completely flat which means e.g. Female so I don't run into these problems to begin with. But this is luckily one of the last parts of the IMatch puzzle for me.

[Mario]

The thesaurus is a global store for text data. Including controlled vocabularies for keywords and other relevant metadata tags.
Nothing that changes often. Maybe some new data is added. But no substantial reorg.

You are away of all the extended capabilities the @Keywords category gives you? Like, reorganizing the keywords in your files easily? Swapping keywords, changing hierarchies etc. with simple drag & drop...

Changing the keywords in your files will not modify your thesaurus. So this may need some planning. Or you re-import the thesaurus from the actual keywords in your files again. Or you just do the same changes to all keywords in your files an your thesaurus in-sync.

With keywords it is the same as with many other things: KISS
People are often tempted to create super-complex hierarchies, just to find down the road that it does not really work in practice. Or that they need to change their controlled vocabulary all the time.
For many people, flat, single-level keywords is all that is needed.

[Jingo]

The thesaurus is a global store for text data. Including controlled vocabularies for keywords and other relevant metadata tags.
Nothing that changes often. Maybe some new data is added. But no substantial reorg.

You are away of all the extended capabilities the @Keywords category gives you? Like, reorganizing the keywords in your files easily? Swapping keywords, changing hierarchies etc. with simple drag & drop...

Changing the keywords in your files will not modify your thesaurus. So this may need some planning. Or you re-import the thesaurus from the actual keywords in your files again. Or you just do the same changes to all keywords in your files an your thesaurus in-sync.

With keywords it is the same as with many other things: KISS
People are often tempted to create super-complex hierarchies, just to find down the road that it does not really work in practice. Or that they need to change their controlled vocabulary all the time.
For many people, flat, single-level keywords is all that is needed.

I actually just did this exact exercise... drag/drop or delete single flat keywords (such as "car") to their simple hierarchical equiv that I may have already had in my @keywords (Objects->Car).  Once all the flat keywords were remapped, a simple thesaurus re-import from the keywords linked it all back together again.  Easy!

[claudermilk]

So did I. Rebuilt the entire structure. I reused a good chunk of it, but changed some branches & how I retained hierarchy. I massively leveraged the @Keywords categories to do this, plus set my entire second screen as the Keywords panel to assist with re-assigning & searching. It took a while, but is all done now.

[jch2103]

Yes, unfortunately this seems to be a good time to tackle things like keywords/thesaurus. I'm making some progress but have a ways to go yet. Turning lemons into lemonade...

[plastikman]

I actually just did this exact exercise... drag/drop or delete single flat keywords (such as "car") to their simple hierarchical equiv that I may have already had in my @keywords (Objects->Car).  Once all the flat keywords were remapped, a simple thesaurus re-import from the keywords linked it all back together again.  Easy!

• What happens to the existing Thesaurus, does it get thrown out and only the new one based on @Keywords written or are they merged/combined in some way?
• One of the things I have to decide is if I want (Object > Vehicle > Car or Object > Furniture > Chair or just Object > Car and Object > Chair). Going back to the KISS principle I should probably use the latter. I definitely don't want to go deeper than 3 levels (first example).
• How do you deal with groups (not written to keywords) e.g. WHO when building in @Keywords. Do you create them as well in @Keywords or skip them if you want to rebuild by importing @Keywords to Thesaurus?

And now is indeed the time to fix these things. I already have more or less all relevant people (and pets) annotated with a face annotation/ID so the People part shouldn't be that hard once I decide on the keywords relevant to them.

That is also my priority with tagging (the first 3 are already good enough for me to work efficiently with my catalog, 4 and 5 are nice to have):

• Geo-tagging/Place and (Country, State, City, Location)
• People and pets
• Event
• Objects in picture
• Anything else e.g, more technical or conceptual description of image (blurred background, group portrait, "love", "childhood")

Thanks!

[Jingo]

• What happens to the existing Thesaurus, does it get thrown out and only the new one based on @Keywords written or are they merged/combined in some way?
• One of the things I have to decide is if I want (Object > Vehicle > Car or Object > Furniture > Chair or just Object > Car and Object > Chair). Going back to the KISS principle I should probably use the latter. I definitely don't want to go deeper than 3 levels (first example).
• How do you deal with groups (not written to keywords) e.g. WHO when building in @Keywords. Do you create them as well in @Keywords or skip them if you want to rebuild by importing @Keywords to Thesaurus?

And now is indeed the time to fix these things. I already have more or less all relevant people (and pets) annotated with a face annotation/ID so the People part shouldn't be that hard once I decide on the keywords relevant to them.

That is also my priority with tagging (the first 3 are already good enough for me to work efficiently with my catalog, 4 and 5 are nice to have):

• Geo-tagging/Place and (Country, State, City, Location)
• People and pets
• Event
• Objects in picture
• Anything else e.g, more technical or conceptual description of image (blurred background, group portrait, "love", "childhood")

Thanks!

So... I don't go crazy with keyword levels because I'm not submitting them to agencies and my images are mainly for my own and family use.  So, I keep it simple... top levels include: Objects, People, Events, Places, Animals
  Sublevels may go 2 deep: Animals|Pets|Shadow  or  much deeper: Places|USA|Florida|Disneyworld|Epcot  or only one level deep: Objects|Boat   or Objects|Car

When I redid my @keywords, I wiped my thesaurus by using the Import from database command.. but this is because I do not keep extra items in my thesaurus... if you do, you'll want to be sure you merge them in some fashion.  If you use controlled vocabularies, you'll want to be extra careful not to lose this data.

I generally handle Geotagging from the MAP Panel and use Metadata Templates for frequent places (like home) - this provides "one stop shopping"... geo coords, location data, plus keyword tags.. all with a single click from the Favorites.  I do this for my pets as well who are always located home... one metadata template assigns lots of data in one go!

Good luck everyone...

[Mario]

What happens to the existing Thesaurus, does it get thrown out and only the new one based on @Keywords written or are they merged/combined in some way?

Importing Thesaurus Data

So... I don't go crazy with keyword levels because I'm not submitting them to agencies (...)

All agencies (stock and regular) don't support hierarchical keywords. All flat.

[claudermilk]

In my project, I merged. As I got entire branches shifted over, I deleted them. I noted that while there were files with a keyword attached, even if I deleted it from the thesaurus, IMatch would add it back in after I re-opened it. I turned that into a QC function--if that keyword showed up again, I missed a file.