With the improvements in LR 1.1 I have finally had the necessary impetus to totally revamp my cataloguing and keywording structure in LR which has not had a serious refresh since it began in PSE3. Over time it became messy with no clear strategy on how to keyword images.
So, for what it's worth, I thought I would share the results...
My aim is to catch the total essence of an image in a maximum of 4 categories.
My main questions in looking for an image are what is it of and where is it taken. Therefore my two principle keyword categories are
Content
Places
Tags from these two categories are 'mandatory' for every image. There can clearly be more than one tag per image from these top level categories as we will see later.
On top of that, it might be a special event or a holiday or business trip so there are two additional
top level (optional) categories ... Events (birthdays, xmas etc) and Holidays/Work.
Under Content it took me ages to work out a heirarchy that captured image subject succinctly. Funny enough I settled on a structure based closely on the 12 POTN Gallery shares... People, PA, SPorts, Mpsorts, Birds.... etc etc.
One addition is Misc which covers all the stuff that doesn't easily fit into one of the main categories, but a Misc category tag would always be a second tag from the Content section.
Places is broken down in a consistent heirarchy.. Country, County (state), Town, Place... and further down if necessary.
So now when I am tagging new images I ahve a consistent approach and a clear strategy which (hopefully) means that when I search for stuff I get all the relevant images.
In Content, each of the 'POTN' subject categories is further broken down into one or more sub-heirarchies depending on the subject. For example, Birds>Birds of Prey> Owls. But there is also a Birds in
Flight sub category so an image could have 2 tags in birds.
Misc covers things like ebay images, pics of kit, tags for stitched images, test images etc.
People has a top level split between Friends and Family with individuals or family names below that.
Transportation has Aircraft, Bus, Cars, Ships and Trains as a first level split with, for example, military, civil as the next level down in Aircraft.
T&L has cityscapes, coast (beach, cliffs), waterfalls, mountains, reflections etc etc as its sub categories.
With the exception of the individual names in People, the aim is for the content tags to be generic. The specific place names come from the Place tag.
No idea if this of any help or interest.. but happy to expand on it if necessary.
