Catalog Sets and hierarchical / non-hierarchical keywords

[jayp]

Okay. I'm about to lose my mind and get sent to the funny farm.

I'm just starting to whip my collection into shape, having read The Book (parts of it several times) and renaming my files and organizing them into buckets. It all makes perfect sense. I've been using Bridge CS3 to try and assign keywords. My initial thinking was that I really needed hierarchical keywords. Many (perhaps most) of my pictures are nature related, so a taxonomic-like hierarchy is in order. I figured I could do this in Bridge and just get by in Expression Media until the next version came out, which would support keyword hierarchies, and then I'd be good to go.

It's not working out so well.

Part of the problem is that as I go along, I find ways to better organize the hierarchy. I also at times would place keywords in a temporary set (like Peter's book suggests) for easy access. Going back, I now see "the same" keywords in multiple places. In others, Bridge is forcing the hierarchy, whatever it was at the time I assigned a keyword to a picture.

So now I'm thinking that catalog sets in Expression Media are the best way to organize this information? (I've seen reference to this in other threads that are asking the same basic question).

But now I wonder, what's the point of keywords at all? Upfront, I'm an amateur, and this cataloging is really for me only. While I'd like to embed these hierarchies as keywords, I'm not concerned about sending the pictures off to others.

If keywords are this finicky, how should I use them?

Just have one flat list in Bridge with subject keywords and then delete keywords (from Bridge) as the list gets too long?

Should I assign them in Expression Media?

I'm ready to just skip them completely for now, and then if easier tools come along, I could assign them from my catalog sets.

I'm just beside myself knowing how to really proceed, and I want to have a solid plan moving forward, before I find that hours of work aren't very useful.

[billseymour]

JayP-
I'd be interested to hear what others more experienced than I have to say, but here are some quick thoughts of mine:

1. One of the phrases in Peter's book, that I have come to understand better over time, is essentially: 'Don't do too much'. You need to do what is necessary to achieve your purpose, but the goal, after all, is making images and being able to find them, not to generate the ultimate hierarchical keyword list that will withstand the test of all time. (Or something melodramatic like that...)

So this is yet another case (like choosing technology) of asking yourself first: what do I need for my purposes? - and then implementing things.

2. I am also more of an amateur (ie, I am not preparing my keywords for others, only for me to find stuff). I also am still evolving my 'system' of keywords. So I keyword in a 'flat' way, trying to be consistent and to learn what works best as I go.

After the first 3 months of keywording, I went into iView/EM's 'Organize' panel. Here, I can get my keywords listed, and importantly, I can click a keyword and get all the images where it appears. So, I reviewed my keyword list. Sometimes I saw that my singular/plural scheme needed refinement- if this was so, I could select a keyword that should be changed/erased, and modify all files at once to reflect the change.

I continue to 'massage' the keyword list, making changes (in batch) to appropriate files, and at the end, I sync-annotate to push all the changes back into the image files, and I Save the catalog.

My conclusion: If you have 'enough' of a system, then use that and move on and take more great photos. If you really need the precision of a complex keyword system, then by all means take the time to build one.

Hope this helps-
(2008, DAM, clueless, ...Bill)

[jayp]

I'm certainly guilty of being paralyzed by indecision... 

My real purposes, as you said, are to be find what I'm after. Particularly the nature photographs, which I may well use for teaching purposes one day. So I'd say there could be a tremendous amount of value in being able to filter by an Order, or Family, or just by Species.

I want to speed this process up as much as possible, but I fear that if I don't spend a little time and work, in the end, I want be able to find what I need very easily. (This is the way it's been for the last few years, and the reason I'm wanting to get it sorted out now!)

So with keywords, do you apply them all in Expression Media? Or do you use Bridge and just create flat keywords when you need assign them, and then delete them from Bridge when the list starts getting too full?

Because trying to manage flat keywords in EM seems unwieldy as the list starts to grow into the hundreds or even thousands.

[ScottBuckel]

Jay -

I primarily shoot nature as well and you may have read a few of the threads in the past that I think I started.  I have spent much time photographing birds and other animals in the past and part of my college training is in natural history.  I have lead bird trips as a college student and I have provided many people I know images for their teaching uses.  I to sometimes need to find images pased on family or order

I have created several catalog sets that have all of the North American birds (from AOU list in excel).  It was slightly tedious to do it and it definitely at the time seem to be the correct thing to do.  I have found that such a catalog set was not easy for me to work with at all.  The AOU list has about 1200 birds, with many famlies and orders.  I am very familar with the systematics, but this list was difficult for me to work out.  I need to spend a little more time proofreading my set of catalog sets and I can make it available.

What has worked for me is to create a controlled vocabulary with this same information.  Currently, I have just completed and I am starting to use a controlled vocabulary for all of my NA birds and it is working very well for me.  I have completed as of this weekend (I have had a couple of productive sleepless nights) controlled vocabularies for birds based on geographic location (Australia, Antarctic and South American), mammals of NA, and reptiles of NA.

Now as I am keywording images I change the vocabulary depending on what I am doing.  I will use the animal systematics vocabularies initially, then I use the controlled vocabulary that David Reicks has developed, then I have a vocabulary that I use for animal behaviors.  I am thinking of devleoping one that has other attributes like colors and emotions to use in keywording stock photos.

For personal projects I have been using catalog sets and find them a very useful thing.  I have been using my new workflow based on Peter's book, with modifications that fit my brain and uses for the past 6 months now and it is working very well for me.  It took me years to come to this point though.  I have also been working on a web site in the past several months and I plan of posting a detailed version of my work flow and make many of the vocabularies available for use.

I hope this helps,

Scott

[frankgindc]

For what it's worth, I just finished keywording 10,000 (weird, it's exactly 10,000) images in Lightroom.   I had imported many of them from "flat keyword" set ups in iView/EM and it wasnt' too much trouble to create heirarchies out of them.    I'm mostly keywording for personal use (and for some volunteer work).

First, all of my keywords are unique.  So, once I wrote all of my keywords into the RAW files from EM, I just imported them into LR.  LR picked them up and showed the flat keywords in its keyword list.

Second, I created the heirarchies in LR.   That is, I created a few parent keywords and then dragged the child keywords into them.   So that, for example, the keywords "mom", "dad", "babyG" etc. were dragged to a parent keyword called ">Family".  etc. etc. etc.   (BTW, I use that ">" only so that the keywords, which sort alphabetically, will be sorted with the parent keywords at the top of my list, for easy finding).

Third, I'm still finding stray keywords (say, based on misspellings and on a batch of 1,000+ images that I just rediscovered yesterday) but these are easily incorporated into the heirarchal system.  For example, I recently acquired a new person named "Ben" in the family, in addition to a friend of mine named "Ben".   I changed the latter to "BenD", and put it under ">Friends" and then brought in the new keyword "BenG" and put it under the parent "Family".   And, to transition from something like a misspelled "BneG" to "BenG", I first select all the "BneG" images, then add the "BenG"keyword to them, and then remove the "BneG" keyword form the images and delete it from the database.

As I understand it, the keyword heirarchy would still work if I had two "Bens" under different parents BUT I think that's setting things up for confusion later so I have only unique keywords in my system.  I don't know if I'd have the same flexibility if I had the same keywords appearing under different parents.

MY POINT:  This all is a long way of saying that if you set up with unique keywords which are flat, they should be very easy to transition to a heirarchal system (or to adjust that heirarchy later) in whatever program you're in.  That's the case in LR anyway.  And one key lesson that I took away from Peter's DAM book is to always have a way out of your current DAM program (I'm paraphrasing horribly here, but you want to keep your future options open).

On another note, I thought I had received word that EM now supported heirarchal keywords.....or maybe that's just their new beta?   

In any case, one issue with the EM catalog sets is that they are not recognized by or exportable to other programs.   In my case, I also was using Catalog Sets (so that I could have heirarchies) and ended up adding the lowest level set as keywords to the images based on their catalog sets.  There is actually a script I used for that which did that automatically in EM.

Frank

[jayp]

Scott, your suggestion of controlled vocabularies sounds like what I need. Do I understand correctly then, that a controlled vocabulary allows you associate one keyword, say Golden-cheeked Warbler, with other keywords that get added automatically, say Dendroica chrysoparia, Parulidae, Passeriformes? Can you also assigned just a Family & Order if you haven't taken the time to identify something to species? (I'm thinking of certain taxa that I don't know as well.)

Also, do you add keywords as you go along? Or do you try to build a master list and import lots of keywords, before you need them or not? (I'm thinking it might make more sense to import all birds, since that's my primary interest, but then do others as needed?)

Finally, are there any well documented ways of importing controlled vocabularies? I've seen references to using Excel, but haven't seen a step by step explanation of actually building a controlled vocabulary. (I'm assuming that all I need to do is copy the "Default" located at C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Roaming\Expression Media\Plug-ins\Vocabulary\, name it something like "Organisms", and then build a copy seperated file to replace keywords.txt ?)

Also, do you lump as many keywords as logical into one vocabularly (so that you don't have to switch back and forth between vocabularies?)

Do you do all your keywording in EM? Or do you doing anything in Bridge?

Sorry for all the questions, but this is actually making much better sense to me. I could already foresee the pain of trying to drag and drop files into a hierarchical tree (catalog sets) with hundreds or thousands of taxa!

(And Scott, I've sent you a personal email at your address listed under your profile)

[Sigi]

Jay,

just download EM 2 beta. You have hierarchical keywords in this version.

Sigi

[ScottBuckel]

Jay -

I just changed my email contact - the one with my profile was an older ISP address. 

I have a vocabulary that is for birds and when I type the bird's name the family and other scientific names are entered as well.  I used a combination of excel and word to create my vocabularies and they are creatively named NAbirds.  This file is a separate file to keywords.txt and resides in the same directory.

Scott

[jayp]

I thought I'd add a quick reply in case some future visitor comes across this thread looking for guidance.

I believe that using a controlled vocabulary is the way to go when you need to classify something like a hierarchy (for example, organismal taxonomy or anything else that needs to have sets of keywords applied all at once). It's way faster and easier to maintain over catalog sets, and the information can travel with pictures since keywords can be embedded.

If you're at all confused how to set this up (when I first started seeing the term "controlled vocabulary", I didn't understand how to use one), here's what you do.

You can create a simple text file called keywords.txt for Expression Media to use. On windows (Vista), these files are stored at: C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Expression Media\Plug-ins\Vocabulary. (The path will differ on XP and Macs of course, but you can figure that out.)

Inside this directory, you'll find a directory called Default, and you can create as many new directories as you want to have controlled vocabularies. Then simply  place a text file called keywords.txt inside a given vocabulary directory.

The beauty of this is that you can take information off the web (say the taxonomy of a given group of critters), bring it into excel, place your desired keywords in separate columns, and then save as a comma separated text file.

Then, when applying keywords in EM, as you type the first keyword in the list, the rest will appear automatically and get applied too.

And in case you're not aware, you can edit the list or add new entries in EM by going to: Edit --> Preferences -->  Vocabulary Editor. You can also just open up the keywords.txt file and make edits there.