As anyone who cares about keywords, I’ve spent a lot of time working on them and trying to improve their organization. Some time ago, I came upon a free, quite extensive list and my own list is based on it: The Lightroom Keyword List Project. Just as that list, all the material on this page is free and available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
While it’s a very good starting point, I found The Lightroom Keyword List Project‘s list lacking in a very important aspect: plants. Since I like to have flowers’ names as keywords, this was something I wanted to improve. I also made many other modifications and some corrections. I didn’t keep a record of every little change, but I’ll mention some of the main ones.
- Modifications I’ve made
- Classification of most buildings by type (military, religious, commercial, etc…).
- Classification of animals by family (dolphin and whale in Cetacae, and so on…).
- Added keywords and sections
- The extensive birds list from The Lightroom Keyword List Project is included. That said, for now I kept the small list with ducks, eagle, etc… Feel free to delete either the simple or extended list and keep only the one you’re comfortable with. With the extended one, of course, you’ll have to get familiar with many new names. Be prepared to spend more time than ever on Wikipedia to learn them. Here’s one to get you started: the common chicken is “red junglefowl” is the extended list (in GALLIFORMES > Pheasants and allies). I know it seems like overkill, but remember that you can create custom keywords sets with the names you use often, so you don’ have to go through the full hierarchy every time.
- In ~WHAT > ~Concept: number (from 1 to 12), letter (a to z, English alphabet) and religion (with a few subdivisions).
- ~Brand section in ~ATTRIBUTE. There are just a couple of keywords for now. I’ll add more as needed.
- New section for vegetation and especially the subcategory plants (~WHAT > ~Vegetation > ~Plant). Most known plants should be there, classified in the 4 major groups, more than 600 families and close to 24,000 genera. I stopped there, since including the distinct species would add more than a million records and would be way too much. Even as it is, it should satisfy the craziest plant “keyworders” 😉 With very few exceptions (morning glory, for one), all names are only in latin, but I’ll include the common English names little by little, as I add keywords to my own pictures of flowers and other plants.
- Some camera gear used to take the picture (~Gear in the ~PHOTOGRAPHY section). While the body and lens are included in the EXIF data, it is not the case for accessories such as filters or extension tubes (at least not with the Canon 12mm extension tube on my 7D Mark II). Again, this list is far from being exhaustive. Those keywords are not set to be exported.
- I have also added some keywords or synonyms here and there.
- Removed keywords
- I removed the ~WHERE section, in which you are supposed to add a hierarchy of countries, states and cities. Since this can be included in the IPTC metadata, for me it is not necessary to have that in keywords as well.
Of course, there is still a lot to be done. For instance, it would be nice to have a comprehensive list of fruits and vegetables, or add more animals.
If you are willing to help with any of this, feel free to let me know.
Downloads
Full keywords list (recommended): kelmond.com lightroom keywords – 2016.07.05
Plants list (only for those who already use The Lightroom Keyword List Project’s Foundation List and don’t need all the modifications I’ve made): kelmond.com lightroom keywords – plants – 2016.07.05
[kofi]