Keyword delays and autocomplete competition

Question

I am seeing two regular problems with keywording:
1) When I commit to my keywords by hitting Return or Tab, it sometimes accepts them immediately, but much more frequently freezes up giving me the beachball of death for an extended period of time. In the most recent case, it took 47 seconds to save the new keywords added to an already-keyworded image. I'd added about 10-15 more to an image that already had a similar number. I've tried new images with no keywords, images with existing keywords, and can't find what predicts when this happens, but it happens most of the time. iMac G5 1.8GHz with 1Gb RAM so not high spec, but this isn't where the program should be slow.
2) When typing keywords, Lightroom helpfully tries to autocomplete for you. However, there are two unexpected things to this behaviour. I am a fast and accurate touch typist (c 100 words/minute) and it seems something in the autocomplete algorithm is loosing my keystrokes. I frequently notice that when it is trying to suggest autocomplete words it either looses a letter from the keyword I am trying to type, or much more frequently transposes two of my letters. This does not happen when I am tying anywhere else so I am convinced it is not my typing. Also, I'm pretty sure the usual behaviour with autocomplete on the Mac (e.g. in Microsoft Word) is that if an autocomplete suggestion comes up you can hit Return to accept it... in Lightroom, if you do this, it thinks you're wanting to finalise your keywords... which even worse, then activates Problem #1 most of the time. You shouldn't have to move over to the arrow keys to accept an autocomplete suggestion: while it is autocompleting, can we please have it accept Return as a confirmation?

Answer 1

Hi Duncan,
With regards to problem 1, please see my thread here :
http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx/.3bc33210/11
All I can say is "hoorah"; there's finally someone else with enough keywords to have hit on the problem. I think that we'll see more and more people hit on this problem as LR gets used more intensively. It's frustrating since I tried very hard to bring the problem to the attention of the engineers during the beta, but I don't think that there were enough people experiencing it for it to be noticed. It sould seem that most people are intensive keyworders.
The behaviour is very simple - adding a new keyword is very, very slow when you already have lots of them. I have over 1000 keywords so far, and adding a new one takes 10 to 15 seconds.
When the keyword that you're adding to an image already exists in the database, the delay doesn't occur.
I'm desperate for this issue to be fixed.
Tim