Losing Keywords in Bridge CS4

[Mike DiVita]

Ever since I started using Bridge in CS4, I see that Bridge does not always write keywords for me. This happens when I select more than 1 keyword before the first keyword is completed. If I add a keyword, wait until it's done, then add another ond so one I'm ok. Has anyone else had this problem and know a fix?

Thanks,
Mike

[peterkrogh]

Mike,
This kind of behavior is why I generally don't keyword in Bridge.  Lightroom or Expression Media.
Peter

[Louie Sherwin]

Mike,

I was wondering if applying a succession of keywords might cause  problems. I haven't noticed what you are describing but I haven't checked either. I will now check to see. It would be a bummer if Bridge was not serializing the keyword updates. It should be easy to test.

At this point I have pretty much determined that Bridge is the easiest place to do all my keywording but that  may change now.

-louie

[Louie Sherwin]

Mike,
This kind of behavior is why I generally don't keyword in Bridge.  Lightroom or Expression Media.
Peter

Hi Peter,

So how are you applying your keywords these days if not in these applications?

-louie

[peterkrogh]

Louie,
Sorry, that was not clear.  THere is a period after Bridge, not a comma. 

My typical workflow it to add bulk keywords at ingestion with IIP.
If I have a small shoot, I edit in Bridge, generally without adding more keywords.  If the card waw multiple situations, there may be no bulk metadata that describes the photos, so I might add some location and keyword information.

If it's a large shoot that I'll use Lightroom on, I will use keywords if it helps to break the shoot into usable groups for the editing process.

In either case, I'll do my further annotation and grouping in Expression Media. I'll either use Keywords or Catalog Sets, as has been discussed in other places on the forum.

Peter

[Louie Sherwin]

Thanks for the clarification Peter. I missed your  "full-stop" after "Bridge" and thought I had missed a whole new discussion about keywording tools. ;-)

-louie

[Louie Sherwin]

Hi Mike,

You have to let all the keywords get written out into all of the selected image files before trying to assign another one to the same or a different selection. Otherwise the previous assignment will get clipped. That's a pretty big gotcha. I'm glad that you pointed this out before I got too far in with my keywording. I will have to go back and check my work.

The thing that I like about doing this in Bridge instead of EM2 or Lightroom is that the keywords are written into the XMP metadata of each image and you don't have to sync to the file as a separate step. However, having to wait for Bridge to update every image file for each keyword that I want to apply is going to be really slooooooow.   :-(

I use David Riecks  Controlled Vocabulary which I have installed in both Bridge and EM2. I went back and tried doing some keywords in EM2 and I quickly realized why I decided to do this in Bridge. I think that the EM2 keyword entry interface sucks. Every time I try to use it something gets messed up. Either I can't find the terms I want or when I find the term, it applies the list of terms as one string of comma seperated terms rather than individual terms. It really makes me wonder if the developers of EM2 have really spent any time using the program or not.

The Bridge interface is way easier to use. Searching for terms is very straight forward. You just start typing and then use the next or previous button to search through your dictionary until you find the appropriate set of terms.  I have it setup to apply all the parent terms as the default action so I can quickly (well not so quickly now)  build a very complete set to terms to my images. I guess I'll just have to be patient and let Bridge do it's thing.

-louie

[Mike DiVita]

Louie,
Yeah, I agree it is slow and painful. I haven't tried EM2 since I haven't upgraded from EM1. From what I've seen with Bridge is that it initially appears to write all of the keywords. It's only when I go back to the folder/files at a later point that I see that they aren't all there. I don't have to quit out of Bridge to see this happen.

Mike

[peterkrogh]

Mike,
The issues is a fundamental one with a Browser. It first writes the new metadata to the central cache, so that it has a list of what to accomplish.  Then it needs to go out and write to individual files themselves.  Then it needs to update both the central and distributed cache to indicate that the new data exists - that's a lot  of writes to a lot of different places.

While the cache management in CS4 has definitely improved, it's still far from perfect.

With a catalog program, it only has to write locally to the database - much simpler and more direct. 
Peter

[joshmcculloch]

Just thought I'd throw another thought into the mix here.  While I usually add bulk metadata on ingestion via Image Ingester like Peter, I do sometimes add additional bulk metadata in Bridge.  I've found the easiest way to add keywords (and other metadata) is via the "File Info..." panel.  The only catch here is that you need to make sure to work on a "Top Down" method (adding keywords that apply to all images first, then getting into more specific words for smaller groups of images) or you'll run into Bridge giving you just the dreaded "(Multiple Values)" text.

Cheers, Josh