Lightroom--easiest way to do this

Hi All,

I'm new to Lightroom after using Bridge for years. I am starting to understand the benefits of the collections and virtual copies and really looking forward to getting immersed in everything.

My question is simple: I imported all my photos and I would like to clear them of any keywords, star ratings, labels and basically all metadata except for the camera's exif data.

What is the most efficient way to do this? I tried googling yesterday but just got a bunch of pages on how to organize and work with catalogs, but not this specifically.

Thanks,
Randy

Permanently or just when you export the image? It's a shame to delete keywords if they are accurate since they are very powerful to use in LR.

To permanently remove all keywords without affecting your list of keywords to use for the future just go in Library mode, with your view in grid mode and select your top most folder. Click the grey background of any image then Cntl-A (Windows) to select every single image in the catalog. From that point you can delete all of the keywords from the Keywording -> Keyword Tags panel on the right hand side.

With all of the images still selected you can change the star rating for all of them (to none) and the color flag for all of them (to none). You should also be able to set the Metadata Preset to None on the right hand side and change the star and color ratings there.