Keywording

doobs

All-Pro
Location
Williamsburg, VA
Name
Chris
Greetings all,

I'm somewhat of a lurker here, (Cameraderie) but due to the warm environ, I think it's a good place to pose this question about keywording.

Like many, when my first DAM application (iMatch) showed up on my computer, I went crazy with keywording. Over a hundred tiered keywords were created and I dutifully went about assigning as many keywords to my images as possible.

And the the fatigue set in as there where WAY to many and picking them meant scrolling through an extensive list. So the keywording stopped some 8-9 years ago.

I've accumulated some 60,000 images in my library over the past 20 years or so, but had never really done anything with them.

After being sent home in March with the CV19 quarantine, I decided it was time to go through the images.

Currently I use LR as a DAM and Capture 1 to process my images. I been through all this images, did a cursory star rating and exported the notable ones to Goggle Photos, where I made albums to share with my family.

In this process of just culling the images, a couple of hundred notable shots stood out, and I marked them accordingly for further attention.

Now that I have images treated I would like to assign some keywords to them but I want to keep the list short. 10 perhaps?

Would you please provide suggestions of a few keywords that I could use to build my short list?

Thank you in advance.

Chris
 
Last edited:
Hey, Chris, nice to hear from you!

I think you're doing something very useful. While I hope I'll not end up in the same situation, taking the time to review the collection can be very helpful. I noticed that when doing my last round of printing and framing images - it was an enjoyable experience, but even browsing a couple of hundred images was daunting. So it's a very useful thing to do to organise (and rate!) your images, maybe freeing considerable amounts of storage in the process as well. Just one additional idea: Maybe you can set up an "archive" or "rejected" drive to leave things you're not sure about removing (if that's something you're contemplating at all) - what's gone's gone ...

The forum itself had to be set up to tackle the problem you mention - so maybe you can start by using something akin to our categories in the Photography Galleries list? I think you can probably pick a couple of the section titles directly (probably excluding the Showcases, for one) and then add some that are more typical for yourself. I have a couple of ongoing projects and fascinations that'd need their own (maybe even made-up) keywords, but mostly, I find myself able to use what's already there when posting.

M.
 
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