Bridge Keywords driving me nuts! Please help......

Question

I've been directed here by the good people at Elements Village as I have a Bridge specific question that you guys may be able to help with.
I've been using Bridge (CS3, I think) with PSE V4 Mac for several years and have multiple and extensive keywords applied to all my tens of thousands of photos.
I've upgraded to PSE V8 Mac with Bridge CS4. The PSE side of things is fine now. But my Bridge keywords are completely screwed up. With some technical help I've been able to copy my keyword tree from one version to the other. But the problem is that although Bridge is reading my existing keywords, it's throwing them up out of sync, in different parents and in multiples of each keyword. So whereas I had created "All Kids" child keyword under "People" parent in my old version, in the new version "All Kids" appears twice - once as a new parent and again as a child under "Activities", as well as under the original "People" parent. I can't delete the extras as this will remove the tags from all of these photos. I can't move into the "People" parent as there is already a category there and I although I can deselect the incorrect "All Kid" tags and only select the child keyword in the correct place, when I search again on this keyword, it chucks them all up again, with multiple "All Kids" checked. Furthermore, not all photos that I've tagged with All Kids have all three "All Kids" keywords selected, some only have one or t'other tagged.
Obviously, I can make persistant one or both of the new "All Kids" keywords, but neither are in the correct place in my tree and neither will allow me to move them.
This has happened with ALL my existing keywords - multiple copies, in multiple locations.
I've tried resetting the Bridge preferences.
I've tried going through them keyword by keyword and deselecting the new, out of place keyword and re-selecting the correct keyword - to no avail. When I search again, new out of place keywords are thrown up.
I've tried going back to the new install basic keyword list and re building my keyword tree, but the minute I put in a search, out of place keywords are thrown up that I can't move into the correct parent.
I've tried starting again with my keyword system - I imagine this will take months and months and there simply HAS to be an easier way to do this.
I've read and re-read the online manual at Adobe and can find nothing that deals specifically with upgrading versions. As a fairly experienced Bridge user I'm aware of it's powers and am so disappointed that this is proving to be such as stumbling block. When I upgraded my Lightroom last year the move from one version to the next was totally seemless. And after minor teething trouble with the PSE side of things, that upgrade was also pretty straight forward, but this Bridge issue is really frustrating and I'm wondering whether to abandon this upgrade and go back to using Bridge CS3 (which is still installed and is saving my sanity work wise).
So, please, PLEASE, does anyone have any suggestions on how to deal with this?
Thanking you in advance.
PS: I'm not super technical so need serious spoon feeding through this!

Answer 1

Hi Will
Okay, I think I get. That is -if and when- my KW's never come up 
again, I have Bridge on a goose chase for a (junk) word. Now when I 
place a word in Bridge search box, Bridge will use it's own quotation 
marks around your entry word and look for that.
What I mean is, you are not using some kind of Bridge power search 
characters for this search that I might not be aware of.
For example, junk, or NOT=junk, or /junk/
One thing that is driving me a bit nutty right now is, after getting 
all my old KW's to display by clicking on the image file days ago, 
Bridge placed them all under the hierarchy of "Other Keywords", 
meaning my directory structure was lost and every kw ended up under 
this new heading.
  I went and built new category heading for my many KW's and then, 
click and moved these under the new headings and then made permanent 
all of these KW.
My frustration is now, that Bridge does not respect the fact that I 
moved them to different location. That is they are made permanent in 
that new location. But when I relaunch Bridge, and my new KWs 
organization comes up, it all looks fine. Click on any picture and 
Bridge places the old KW in Italics that were listed under Other 
Keywords and throws them in Alphabetical order through out my list, 
as if the move is not respective. So I now have two key words for 
ever one KW wanted.
I understand that if you take someone else folder and place it on 
your system and open an image that those key words might best be down 
under the heading Other Keywords or in italics, and that you would 
not want Bridge to automatically be messing with your own Key Words 
structure.
But I moved these keywords, and bridge does not respect that having 
been made, and how I want those KW's displayed on my page. The KW 
list get vary long and confusing to look at with words out of place 
everywhere amongst my new list. Sometimes you get confused  which 
ones you are suppose to use when new images are brought in.
it is a laborious frustrating process to clean those italic migrant 
keywords out to clean up the house so to speak.
you have to find all presence of that kw
select all those images,
deselect them, sometimes reselect then so that you can deselect them 
to get them all
then delete those italic KW
then check the box so that all those images have only that KW under 
the heading you want permanent.
My machine seems to manage these small word pieces of data 
exceedingly slow. So I may have to wait for a minute or longer  for 
the list to update.
It seems this will take days. and the list could go "poof" again for 
all i know.
Thanks again for your comments!