Tagging strategy: do you include spaces in names?

Question

I'm gearing up to perform the Big Tag Chore, and I'm hoping to get it mostly right the first time -- I'd be grateful for any suggestions/tips you might have to share.
For example, if you tag somebody by full name is it a bad idea to include a space between the first and last name? Or, should I perhaps tag first and last names separately?
Also, do you just leave the tag data in Lightroom, or do you write it all back into the image files themselves?
Any other good suggestions I should keep in mind as I dig into this project?

Answer 1

As you decide what's best for you, beware that LR doesn't handle keywords containing spaces very well:
- In general, there's no way to search by exact keyword match in Smart Collections or the Filter Bar's text search. For example, there's no method to search for the keyword tag "Bob Smith". If you do "contains words: Bob Smith", you'll get images that have a keyword containing the word Bob and a keyword containing the word Smith, not necessarily in the same keyword; e.g. you could get a photo with keyword tags "Bob Johnson" and "Tom Smith". The only general method to search by exact keyword match is to use one or more Keyword columns in the Filter Bar, which can be painfully clumsy if you have more than a couple dozen keywords; there's no similar method for Smart Collections. (For any given search, you can add additional search terms to increase the likelihood of getting the desired results, but that can be painful and error-prone.)
- On Windows, auto-complete of keywords in the Keywording > Keyword Tags pane doesn't handle spaces properly.  You can auto-complete on the first word of a keyword tag, but auto-completion stops after you type the space.
- In the Keyword List > Filter Keyword box, filtering by multiple words will show all keyword tags containing any of the words, not all of the words. For example, filtering by "Bob Smith" will show all keyword tags containing Bob or Smith.
To avoid these problems, some LR users have have avoided spaces in keyword tags (e.g. by using "_" instead).  That may be just fine for your needs, though if you export photos with those keywords, they may be unsuitable or just ugly in other applications or Web services that handle spaces just fine.  Alternatively, you could consider the Any Tag plugin, which better supports filtering and tagging with keywords containing spaces.