Misty Ridge Photography Blog

I don’t follow the Lightroom/Photoshop/Bridge color label conventions. For one thing, they are different for each application and, for another, I can’t remember what they mean. What’s worse, other cataloging applications may use flags 1 thru 5 that the Adobe stuff just doesn’t understand! So, instead, I use status keywords. Status keywords can be anything you need them to be, you can always add more and, if you don’t like the ones you have you can edit them easily. Here’s how I manage my status keywords. Refer to figure 1 to see the list of those I currently use.

Figure 1. Status keywords overcome the limitations of color labels

Notice that status keywords begin with the “at” symbol. This allows you to quickly distinguish them from category keywords (which do not have “@” before them). Notice that the status keywords are grouped under a “master status keyword” cleverly labeled @StatusKeywords. Another important point is that these keywords are not exported with an image. So when you export one of your images to this blog, for example, the status keyword “@NeedsGeotagging” does not go with it. So, suppose you want to add a status tag to make sure barrel distortion is corrected. All you need to do is insert the keyword tag “@NeedsBarrelCorrection” inside of @StatusKeywords and, voila, you have a new status keyword. Make sure it is not exported and you’re in business. Rather than being limited to 5 labels you can now have any reasonable number within different categories (more on this later). And, bonus!, you don’t have to remember what a green label means.

 Now, every time you run across an image where the straight lines are just a little to curvy, you can slap your my newly minted “@NeedsBarrelCorrection” and come back to it later for correction.

When I import new photos into my Lightroom catalog I always add these two status keywords, @NeedsGeotagging and @NotKeyworded. If it is a picture of a beetle, bird or some other critter I also add @NeedsClassification. In practice, I’ve created an import preset that adds all three to each new photo I add. If any are not appropriate I’ll delete them during the keywording process.

One last point, make sure you remove the labels once an image status has changed. Now, if you look at figure 1 carefully, you’ll notice that there are a lot of images in the category “@NeedsGeotagging”. Oops! Guess I’ve got some work to do.

Next time I’ll start digging into how I’m digging myself out of keyword hell!

Hope you find this useful,
Rick the Bug Man