Thanks for responding, Godfrey!
I did do a bit of research before asking, and in line of my
professional work I also deal with Controlled Vocabularies. In the
latter case, however, there are international standards to relate to,
issued from the likes of ISO, HL7, ICH, CEN and so on. Not so for
Lightroom, of course. :-)
My research for LR keywords brought up a lot of interesting things,
though. I'll share what I've found in case it saves someone else a bit
of trouble.
1. Some microstock agencies will provide a defined set of keywords for
photographers to use when uploading images.
2. There are vocabularies available on the web, tailored to certain
types of photography. Some freeware, some payware. Here's a few
commercial ones. If you browse forums and blogs you'll find plenty of
photographers willing to share their keyword lists with others, on
everything from placenames in Alaska to basketball.
http://www.controlledvocabulary.com
http://www.naturfokus.info (Norwegian, tailored for nature photo)
http://www.marinekeywords.com/support/lightroom/
3. The term "controlled vocabularies" are a bit misguiding. They are
controlled as in "limited" and "structured", but due to limitations in
Lightroom, they're not really controlled. There are several things
lacking, but it gets technical... :-) One important issue is inability
to restructure higher levels in a keyword hierarchy. I asked a
question about this at the Adobe Help forums and got a very
comprehensible reply. See bottom of this page:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Lightroom/2.0/WSB0DEA22C-D718-44b8-A367-C7D78DBC0096.html
. Another issue is status of any given keyword. One example here is
country names. At one point in time, "Yugoslavia" was a relevant
keyword. It is still correct for the archived images from the time
when the country existed, but you hardly want to assign it to new
photos from the area. A more elegant and controlled way to handle it
would be to assign a status like "deprecated" to those keywords that
should no longer be used. And ultimately, a vocabulary of keywords
isn't "controlled" until it is founded on common and public standards.
For example, if someone could document that their geographical keyword
set is an adaptation of the official ISO list, and take the
responsibility for maintaining the vocabulary based on changes done at
ISO, then it qualifies as controlled.
4. Lightroom allows parallell hierarchies. This is both convenient and
dangerous. It's convenient if you have pictures that can be keyworded
in totally separated contexts. Take for example one hierarchy for
"fashion" and one for "nature". This would ease the handling and
management, provided that you don't do fashion shoots in the Great
Outdoors, where the hierarchies _can_ become entangled. Same thing if
you keep one set of keywords for "private" and another for "stock" for
example.
5. Building your own hierarchy is probably necessary no matter how
clever a controlled vocabulary is. Take categories like "friends" and
"family" for example, containing names. Build-as-you-go will always be
a part of keywording. However for travel photography, it would save
you a lot of categorising to have a controlled vocabulary of
placenames. If you do species photography, a vocabulary of English (or
in my case Norwegian) names with the Latin name as synonym, it'll save
you a lot of time looking up those Latin names.
So, LightRoom's keywording is both powerful and flexible, but the
chance of screwing it up at some point is substantial, in my opinion.
That's why I asked if anyone has reflected on Best Practices... :-)
Jostein
2009/9/10 Godfrey DiGiorgi <[email protected]>:
> On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 8:00 AM, AlunFoto <[email protected]> wrote:
>> I'm currently looking into switching to Lightroom as my primary
>> archiving tool, and am fascinated by the ease of applying keywords.
>> However, I also realise that I'd like to stick to a *limited* list of
>> keywords, and that the list better be correct and updated.
>>
>> So I would like to request the collective wisdom of the PDML on how to
>> manage keywords. What's your way of doing this? Are there any
>> proverbial Best Practices?
>
> Not sure what you're looking for.
>
> There are many different notions of how to do keywording. Some are
> germain and specific to a stock agency's needs, others are best for
> photo sharing sites like flickr, others best for different business
> and personal uses. There are practically as many keywording policies
> that make sense as there are purposes for which photographs are used.
> The right set of keywords for a given photograph is a powerset of all
> of these ... literal, location, event and emotional keys for finding
> related images in a repository.
>
> Whenever I import images into Lightroom, I apply a basic set of
> keywords for whatever is in the group of images so that I can easily
> find them along with other images that might be loosely related. Once
> I work on the photos a bit, I refine the keywords applied to them.
> Over time, I've built up a few hundred different keywords I use, some
> quite frequently and others only occasionally. I'm constantly
> refining, tuning what is applied to various images with a notion of
> making them more easily identifiable in groups or individually.
>
> There are several books that treat this subject to one degree or
> another, practically and theoretically. Look up "keywords", "data
> asset management" and similar topics for references.
> --
> Godfrey
> Â godfreydigiorgi.posterous.com
>
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