How to use Controlled Vocabulary in Adobe Lightroom (Part 2)

Click any image to view larger

Strangely (for me) this is the fourth consecutive blog on the same subject, normal service will soon be resumed and I will go off at a tangent soon This keywording thing has a lot going on, and the joys of Lightroom are still a bit of an enigma but its an interesting adventure.

Having loaded The Controlled Vocabulary Catalogue in to Lightroom, you may find that things seem to slow down quite a lot. Well I say a lot, but really we are talking response times that are measured by the time-scales usually reserved for geologists. Hopefully the clever people at Adobe can fix the problems in the next version or service pack.

Until The Lightroom team can fix the problem it may be more usable to delete blocks of keywords that you don't use to reduce the load on the system.

To use the keyword hierarchy you can enter keywords in the "keyword Tags" panel:


As you type in keywords, separated by commas the system prompts you with keywords that are available in the list. Once you have entered a few base keywords then pressing enter will cause a bit of a wait if you have a large keyword list. Actually unless you are running Lightroom on a Cray super-computer now would be a good time to put the kettle on.

Eventually all of the parent categories in the vocabulary will appear in the implied keywords box, this is the real power of using a Controlled Vocabulary, simple keywords generate a lot of information.



Finding by Keywords

To search the Keywords you have entered, you can use the the Keywords tag tree on the left. To search for a particular tag, open the find panel on the left or select Library>Find (ctrl+F) on the menu. Select Keywords from the dropdown and enter the tag you are searching for.


As you type your library is instantly filtered:


If Adobe can deal with the performance issues then I think using CV with Lightroom will be a seriously useful combination.

---

Related Posts
Controlled Vocabulary for Adobe Lightroom 1.1 released!

Controlled Vocabulary and Adobe Lightroom 1.1
How to use Controlled Vocabulary in Adobe Lightroom (part 1)