Keyword Tags Won't Delete

I am using Lightroom 1.4.1 on a Vista platform. When I delete keyword tags they disappear temporarily, only to reappear later. I have tried the Purge Unused Keywords function and I have tried to right click the keyword and select Delete. In all cases they seem to be deleted, but reappear later. I have removed the keywords in question from any photos they were applied to, so all the keywords that I'm trying to delete show 0 images. Here is a sample of the keywords: <component; <place; <worklist. Could the "<" sign in the keyword name be the problem? I have tried to rename the keywords, thus removing the "<" from the name, but they still keep coming back. Some more info which may be important in resolving this. These keyword names appear to have been created by Lightroom itself of Photoshop CS3 (V10.0). I originally had keywords enclosed in brackets, eg <place>. When I edited the images with the Develop module and Photoshop, once I returned to the Library module the edited image would have the system created keyword, eg <place (without the closing bracket). In other words I now had two keywords for the same thing: <place> and <place.

Tried the throw away top level key word idea as you suggested, but it didn't resolve the problem. I also deleted the 'dud' keywords from Bridge and Windows Photo Gallery and then went back to Lr and tried the suggestion again. It still didn't work. There are 3 dud keywords that keep reappearing in Windows Photo Gallery, despite having been deleted. It's amazing how all but three seem to have gone for good from Windows Photo Gallery. What makes the three persistent ones special, I have no idea.
What's puzzling is that once I've deleted the dud keywords and then export my keywords to a text file, the text file is 'clean'; like they've gone from Lr. However, when they reappear and I export my keywords again to a text file, they show up in the text file.
It like they're hiding away in the image files or some database in such a way that I can't access them and when I edit or rename a 'good' keyword it causes Lr to re-read the image file or database and import the keywords. This, despite that fact that none of the dud keywords show up in the metadata for any of my images as displayed by Lr; eg in the Keywording panel on the right. They also no longer show up in Bridge or Windows Photo Gallery (except for 3). Furthermore, all the dud keywords show '0' for the number of images they're assigned to.
By the way, I've also tried the Purge Unused Keywords function to no avail.

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LR2-How delete keyword tags

In LR 1.4, I was able to delete keywords from multiple photos by:
1. Highlighting the photos
2. Deleting the targeted keywords from the keyword tags panel.
This is consistent in the LR2 help files: "With photos selected in the Grid view or the Filmstrip, do any of the following: To remove keyword tags from photos, select one or more keyword tags in the Keyword Tags area of the Keywording panel and delete them."
However, this does not work in LR2 on my Vista machine. I can delete keywords from individual photos but if more than on photo is highlighted, the keyword is removed from the first file only. Is this a bug or am I missing something? Thanks in advance, dave

> I can delete keywords from individual photos but if more than on photo is highlighted, the keyword is removed from the first file only. Is this a bug or am I missing something?
You must be doing it in something other than the grid view. If so, then the this behavior is correct.

PSE 9 "Delete Keyword Tags" pops up during Find

This has been occurring for a while, and is quite consistent, but I've never bothered to ask. When I select Find/From History/Imported On, a window pops up with "Delete Keyword Tags" and a progress bar which starts to move. I always immediately hit cancel, and then the "Select one or more groups you imported" window comes up, so I select the date and things work fine.
So what is going on with the "Delete Keyword Tags" window? I've not noticed any tags get deleted, but am I risking losing them if I didn't immediately hit cancel?
Thanks,
John S.

Hi John
It may be simpler to switch to Import batch view. You can the scroll down then list in date order.
Click the Display button (near top right in Organizer) to switch from thumbnail or folder view.

LR Windows XP--How delete keyword tags

I inadvertently imported a lot of photos with the wrong keyword tags. What's the best way--or any way--to remove them? Thanks.

Simply delete the keywords from the Keyword Tags panel on the left side of the display. Keywords deleted from the panel will be removed from all the images tagged with those keywords.

PSE 11 Organizer - deleting keyword tags

I feel silly, but I can't find a mechanism to delete a keyword tag. The online helps says you do it in the tag panel, but then doesn't explain how.

ann1calgary, you do know you can set your mouse to have a right-click? System preferences>mouse:
You can choose to either the left or right side for the secondary click.

Restore deleted keyword tags

I screwed up and while I was in Premiere Elements 4.0, I accidently deleted all of the keyword tags that I had set up in Photoshop Elements 6.0. Does anyone know if they can be recovered?
Although I haven't done a backup within Photoshop--maybe I should have?. I do have a completed system backup and could restore the file from there, but I don't know what file it is.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Mike,
The Tag information is stored in the Elements Organizer
b Catalog
Here is a link to an Adobe technical document that discusses info about the PS Elements 6 Catalog (yes its title does refence migrating but there is much more than migration information)
http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb402592
Here is an extract of some relevant information
Photoshop Elements 6 stores catalog files by default in the following location:
------------beginning of techdoc extract
Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Adobe\Photoshop Elements\Catalogs
Windows Vista: C:\Program Data\Adobe\Photoshop Elements\Catalogs
File extension: Catalog files created by Photoshop Elements 6 use the .PSEDB file extension. Earlier versions of Photoshop Elements used the .PSA file extension.
Database format: Catalog files created by Photoshop Elements 6 uses the SQLite database format. .... Applications that read the SQLite database format are available; however, Adobe does not support or recommend making changes to the database file outside of Photoshop Elements.
------------end of techdoc extract
I suspect that you used the default catalog name and location and that is what is referenced in the text that I extracted from the techdoc.
Continuing with additional relevant information
The default name of the catalog is "My Catalog" (no quotes in actual name). Below the folder shown in the techdoc extract (for XP or for Vista) you should see a folder named
My Catalog
What I would do is to make a copy to save somewhere else of this My Catalog folder as it currently exists - to be kept in case things get worse when you attempt to bring it back from your backuup.
Now there are 2 alternatives
1- bring back that entire My Catalog folder back from your backup to replace the current contents of the entire folder
2- bring only the .psedb file back from the backup and delete all the other files in that My Catalog folder
I would try option 1 first.
If you use option 2, more filles will need to be rebuilt : for example the entire thumbnail cache would need to be rebuilt and depending on how may photos, videos, etc are in the catalog that could take awhile. So I would use option 2 only if option 1 resulted in some problems.
Of course any changes made to the catalog or other related files since that backup would be lost. Photos would need to be reimported and any photo Version Sets made since your backup would need to be built as Stacks instead.

Keyword tags text box poorly designed, crashes PSE 8

I was very interested to see that PSE 8 allows you to enter keyword tags using a text box, as other programs do, promising much faster tagging with large sets of tags. But the feature has serious bugs rendering it unusable.
After trying the keyword-tags text box for less than a minute on my large catalog with 426 tags, PSE 8 crashed.    Even with a fresh catalog and the default tag categories, it will crash after using the text box about 40 times.   (See below for a recipe.)
Another bug concerns tags with commas in them, e.g. "Truckee, CA" (I have a couple hundred such Place tags). If you type "Tru" in the text box, select the tag with the mouse, and hit enter, PSE 8 will create two new tags, Truckee and CA, in the Other category, and apply them to the photo.
A design misfeature: After you select and apply a tag with the text box, it loses the keyboard focus. So to select another tag for the same photo, you have to move your hand to the mouse and click in the text box again. Partially defeats the whole purpose.
Recipe for reproducing the bug:
1. Create a new catalog.
2. Import 50 photos.
3. Select the next photo.
4. In the keyword tag text box, type "p" and then enter.
5. Go to step 3.
On the 40th or 41st photo, my PSE 8 reliably crashes (Vista 32, 4 GB of memory).   If after step 1 you use the Keyword Tags > + > From File command to load a tag heirarchy of 210 tags (see the attached file), it will crash after just 9 photos.   And with 426 tags, it crashes after 5 photos.
Interestingly, on my Vista 64 system (unsupported by Adobe, 8 core x 2.7 GHz), PSE 8 doesn't crash, but the text box gets unusably slow very quickly. WIth 210 keyword tags in the catalog, it soon takes about 12 seconds to find a tag after you type a unique prefix.   That time gradually gets longer the more you use the text box. With 426 tags, it takes almost 20 seconds to apply a tag using the text box.
On both systems, it's clear what the nature of the bug is: Each time you use the text box, the process's memory grows by many megabytes. I believe my Vista 64 system doesn't crash (at least not immediately) because it provides 3.5 GB of memory for use by PSE 8, while Vista 32 only provides about 1.5 GB.
I'm getting a sinking feelilng...

Is the white triangle to the left of "Keyword Tags" pointing down or pointing to the right? See this screen shot:
Click on the white triangle -- does that make a difference?
If not, try deleting the Organizer's preferences:
http://www.johnrellis.com/psedbtool/photoshop-elements-faq.htm#Delete_the_Organizers_prefe rences

To be able to Export Keyword Tags to Excel or as a CSF file

I am using PSE 10 in Windows 7 environment. Have thousands of photos and hundreds of Keyword tags and many Categories and Sub-Categories.
It would be nice to have these Tags & Categoris names in an Excel file (or, comma separated text file) that I can use to easily see what Tags I have so that I don't create new tags with slightly different names. Such an easy-to-access and mange Excel file will be very helpful, I think, to the overall cration and management of Tags.
I have done quite a bit of research on the web and also in PSE forum, but have not found any ways to do this.
Is this possible? Sure would appreciate any help and ideas.
Thank you so much.

Thank you all for your help. I have solved my problem - with your help. Solution was simple:
Save the Keyword Tags as the XML file from the drop down arrow options of the Keyword Tags. Saved it on desktop - but I guess you can save it anywhere you want. Opened MS Excel. Click File/ Open and Selected the XML file saved earlier. In the Dialogue Box that opens up, selected the "As an XML table" option. In the next dialogue box, showing "The specified XML source does not refer to a schema. Excel will create schema based on the XML source data.", clicked OK button.
Excel now creates the table and it filles the schema as the Column names. I deleted the columns that I don't need - most of these are values expressed in hex or some other numbering system. I kept FIVE columns that have the Keyword Category and the Tags names -
tagset-item-value-name
tagset-item-value-name3
tagset-item-value-note
tagset-item-value-name6
tagset-item-value-note8
Now I can play with them as I need - sort, resquence, print, etc.
Hope this helps others. And, again, thank you for your help.

Make a keyword tag a child after it is created as an orphan tag

I created the keyword tag "butterflys" and applied it to some photos.
Later I created a keyword tag of "bees" and applied it to some other photos.
At this point I realized I should have a keyword of "insects".
I created the "insects" keyword but could not find a direct way to make "butterflys" and "bees" child tags of "insects.
I was able to do it by creating keywords of "BU" and "BE" as children of "insects"
Then I selected all the "bee" photos and added the keyword "BE" to them and similiarly selected "butterflys" and added the keyword "BU".
Then I deleted the keywords "butterflys" and "bees".
Finally, I renamed the keyword "BE" to "bees" and "BU" to "butterflys"
There must be a better way!
Lightroom 1.0 on Windows XP on a Compaq Computer.

There is a better way!
First, create the parent keyword, "Insects". Then, in the "Keyword Tags" pane, drag the child-to-be (no pun intended...) keyword (i.e. "Butterflys" or "Bees") and drop it on the parent-to-be keyword (i.e. "Insects").
hope that helps!

Keyword tags disappeared

Hello.
I am using Photoshop Elements Organizer 8. For some unknown reason, the keyword tags disappeared from my Organize tab and were replaced by a drop-down text box with all my tags. I can't figure out how to get my hierarchical display of tags with icons back. Can anytone out there explain this to me, please?

Is the white triangle to the left of "Keyword Tags" pointing down or pointing to the right? See this screen shot:
Click on the white triangle -- does that make a difference?
If not, try deleting the Organizer's preferences:
http://www.johnrellis.com/psedbtool/photoshop-elements-faq.htm#Delete_the_Organizers_prefe rences

How do I combine duplicate keyword tags in the organizer ?

While organizing my photos I realized I made duplicate keyword tags for the same person. Is there a way that I can combine two keyword tags for one person into one ?

Do you mean you assigned two slightly different keywords to the same person ? Like personA and personB ? If that is the case, select all persoB, assign also person A. Then delete 'personB' keyword.

Unable to add Keyword Tags in Organizer PSE 9

I am beyond frustrated at this point. I have never run across a more buggy program than PSE9 (or 8 for that matter). I am particularly having trouble with the organizer in PSE 9. I have spent that last day or so tagging a catalogue of about 2000 photos when suddenly the organizer froze up. I killed it and restarted. Then it wouldn't even load. So I thought to load another catalogue to see if that worked. It loaded up just fine. I switched to the catalogue I had had the problem with and PSE pretty much shut my computer down at that point. So, I restarted the computer, loaded up the organizer and actually got it to open the catalogue. I ran a repair on it. It said that it had fixed some errors. Great, I thought, everything is fine. Well, no, it wasn't. Now whenever I attempt to add a keyword tag, delete a keyword tag, or even add a caption, the organizer just gives me an error. It is only happening on this particular catalogue. I have repaired it, optimized it, and even regenerated the thumbnails. I always get an error when I try to edit anything. I can view the pictures just fine. I can open them up from the organizer into the editor just fine. I just can't delete, add captions or keyword tags at this point. If I have lost the all the work I did last night and today tagging these photos, then I am going to be mighty mad. If anyone has any suggestions, then please let me know. I don't want to think that I have wasted time, and most of all, money on this program. Thanks.

I am beyond frustrated at this point. I have never run across a more buggy program than PSE9 (or 8 for that matter). I am particularly having trouble with the organizer in PSE 9. I have spent that last day or so tagging a catalogue of about 2000 photos when suddenly the organizer froze up. I killed it and restarted. Then it wouldn't even load. So I thought to load another catalogue to see if that worked. It loaded up just fine. I switched to the catalogue I had had the problem with and PSE pretty much shut my computer down at that point. So, I restarted the computer, loaded up the organizer and actually got it to open the catalogue. I ran a repair on it. It said that it had fixed some errors. Great, I thought, everything is fine. Well, no, it wasn't. Now whenever I attempt to add a keyword tag, delete a keyword tag, or even add a caption, the organizer just gives me an error. It is only happening on this particular catalogue. I have repaired it, optimized it, and even regenerated the thumbnails. I always get an error when I try to edit anything. I can view the pictures just fine. I can open them up from the organizer into the editor just fine. I just can't delete, add captions or keyword tags at this point. If I have lost the all the work I did last night and today tagging these photos, then I am going to be mighty mad. If anyone has any suggestions, then please let me know. I don't want to think that I have wasted time, and most of all, money on this program. Thanks.

Keyword Tags list Incomplete

I've finally got round to importing my old scans into Lightroom. They all have comprehensive keywording. I don't use LR's hierarchical system, so all of my keywords are at the top level of the Keyword Tags list.
But when I scroll through the list in the Keyword Tags pane on the LHS, it is truncated, only displaying the list as far as "Cesar". When I export the keywords as a .txt file, they're all there.
Also, if I add new keywords by writing them in the Keyword Tags box on the RHS, it can take several minutes (yes, I do mean minutes, not seconds) of waiting before LR completes the action. I've tried Optimising the catalog, but it doesn't seem to make any difference, and 'backup' doesn't find any corruption in the catalog.
Any Ideas? Or do I have to reorganise my keywords into a hierarchical structure?
Patrick Cunningham

Possman, Yes, I fully understand what you mean. I think if I were you I would want the same.
In a hierarchical system as you have it is much easier to handle and remember) a large number of keywords as many of them are implied ones (NH, NH7, NH76 eg). In a truly flat system (one without any structure at all) 10000 must be a nightmare.
There are millions and millions of people taking pictures and there may be as much systems for keywording; everyone invents his or her own system. May be my background (ICT) forced me to think in a very structured and organized way. May be that's why I choose a hierarchical list from the beginning. I feel my keyword approach helped me in keeping the effort of tagging everything in LR as small as possible. Although, let's be honest, on the road to success I have said some things I won't repeat here....
I wonder if importing an existing tagging system would make one happy. It sounds attractive but a conversion/migration is sometimes even worse than starting from scratch: garbage in, garbage out. My brother in law tried to convert his system from old to new; it was a disaster. I took so much time that starting from scratch would have been wiser (and better for his marriage :-)).
But I agree with you that LR should at least have an option to import what one has, no matter the number of keywords. From a commercial point of view that would be a very sound approach as well. Let the customer choose!
However I still do not think one could demand from Adobe that LR should be so open and so flexible that no matter which system will be imported it will fit into LR without any problem. That is simply not possible I am afraid. So there will always be disappointed users.
But as Adobe is advertising LR as a DAM system their keywording solution should be more mature than it is right now.

Keyword Tags in PSE11

I have a problem with the keyword tags in PSE11.
Problem Statement:
When a keyword tag is selected, the resulting subset of photos includes images that are not tagged with the selected keyword. The non-matched items that are displayed all have a distinguishing symbol – a non-match icon
However this behaviour is inconsistent. There are many other non match photos that are completely suppressed, so why are these ones being displayed with a ‘non-match’ icon?
Steps Taken:
I have tried repairing the catalog. The system tells me there are no inconsistencies but I use the ‘repair anyway’ option to force a repair. This has no effect.
Through the help system I discovered this document:
http://helpx.adobe.com/crx/kb/HowToCheckLuceneIndex.html
This document contains instructions on how to delete the index files to force the system to rebuild them. Unfortunately none of the files and path names specified in the instructions exist on my system so this is a non-starter. Q. Does the process differ for my version (PSE 11)?
I am flummoxed as to what is going on and would appreciate some help please. TIA

I'm just off fo bed as I am in the UK. I guess you're US maybe West Coast? Let's figure out a time to discuss. 08:00 your time is 4 pm mine if you're on Pacific time.
I'd be delighted if it was a usage error. Let's ne direct and say user error! Because that would be the easiest thing to resolve. But I still remain unconvonced because I am seeing different behaviour between Picasa and PSE. In a further attenpt to solve this issue today PSE 11 I wrote the metadata out to the files to see if that would make any difference to PSE. It did not. And then I let Picasa read that data to see if it did there, and it did not.
I just opened the file info about one of the non match photos that appears when the tag is selected, The same tags appear in the IPTC info as appear on the bottom right corner of the individual phto in the PSE views, and NONE of them isthe major tag that I selected as a filter. Ergo the inclusion must be because of something inherent in the Catalog wouldn't you say? Something related to the data that PSE holds outside the EXIF data. The same filter applied in Picasa does not include these non match images - which would seem to confoirm that it is PSE11-side that teh issue is occuring.
To be clear, I do NOT have the option switched on to show non-match results and I have even toggled that on and off to see if it would make a difference.
What is perfectly possible, altough I cannot say for sure that it applies in this case, is that at some stage the files DID carry the tag on which I was filtering but that I removed it. I can't recall doing so specifically, but often when a batch rage contains a vase majority to which a tag applies, I will tage the lot then untag the ones to which the overall tag does not apply. Thts's sometimes quicker than delecting teh non compliant items. Could there be an artifact?

PSE 9 Organizer Error Adding Keyword Tags and Other Woes

Hello, everyone. I am having a ton of problems with PSE 9 Organizer. The most frustrating and biggest problem is that I believe my catalog has been corrupted beyond repair. I spent all of yesterday tagging my photos. I had no problems and everything seemed to be going well until all of the sudden, the organizer suddenly froze up. I had to use the Windows task manager just to get it to close. This happened several times. Finally, the organizer locked up my computer and I had to restart. I opened the catalog and didn't seem to have any problems at that point. I was able to view all of the images, video files etc. I was even able to open the editor from the organizer. When I tried to add a tag to a photo it gave me an error. All it said was "error adding keyword tag" then nothing. I tried to delete the photo and all it said was "error deleting photo". This "error" shows up any time I try to make any changes to all of the images. I can't add any new photos, can't delete, or add tags. I have repaired the catalog several times. It found errors the first time, but evidently that didn't fix my problem. I also optimized and deleted my thumbnail cache to see if that was the issue. Still nothing. I have other catalogs and they work fine, so it is something to do with this particular catalog. Any suggestions on what to do next? Can I move the pictures to a new catalog without losing the tags? And no, I didn't write the tags to the images because I wasn't done tagging. Besides, PSE doesn't always write the tags correctly, as you probably know. Next problem. When I first open PSE and select the organizer, it doesn't alway open. I can see it on my taskbar (Windows 7 64 bit), but I can't get the window to maximize. I have to close and open several times to get the window to open. Sometimes it randomly jumps to my second monitor like it can't decide where to go. Very frustrating. I would appreciate any suggestions about what to do. Thanks.

Back to the original question, after thinking about this for a couple days I have had two ideas for workarounds:
1) Copy my tag names into the photo metadata and create a new catalog to bring all of my images into. This will allow me to keep all of my existing tags, and it MIGHT solve the tag display problem based on a test with a couple images in a new catalog. The downsides to this are a) permanently writes my tags into the photo metadata which will be bad if I decide to change something later, b) loses all version sets, and c) loses all albums (although I don't have that many). I found instructions for this workaround at http://www.johnrellis.com/psedbtool/photoshop-elements-faq.htm#_Merging_Catalogs.
2) Live with the lack of color tag display in Organizer, and use reverse searches to find missing tag categories. For example, if I want to find all photos that do not have a "Places" tag, I check the box next to the "Places" category (which also selects all sub-categories and tags below this). Then I go to the Options drop-down in the Find Bar and "Hide best match results" and "Show results that do not match". This gives me every image in my catalog that does not have a tag from the "Places" category, so I can go through and tag these as appropriate.
I would have gone with #1 if it weren't for the permanence of the keywords. I guess I have a commitment problem (or I just haven't got my tag hierarchy figured out yet). Instead, I am going with #2 which should give me most of what I need for now. I will still hold out some small glimmer of hope that Adobe manages a fix for this issue down the road.

Keyword Tags Won't Delete

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