Keywording Photos—Benefits and Tips

Does it take you more than a few seconds to find that great photo of that Reddish Egret Dark-morph feeding on a small fish at a particular park? If you have thousands, or even tens of thousands of images, it can be like finding a needle in a haystack.  It can also be frustrating to have so many photos and knowing that they are just getting lost in your ever growing collection of shots.

It’s all about effective keywording. I keyword all of my images extensively. The downside of keywording—and the only downside that I can think of—is the time it takes to set up an effective keyword hierarchy. But the benefits far outweigh the downside. The benefits are a big time savings when looking for a particular image, less frustration and a sense of total control over your photo collection.

Here are some tips for successful keywording:

• Decide what’s important to you and use keywords that make it easy to find those things that matter.
• Some things should always be keyworded. I always add keywords for the places my photos were taken. I remember where most of my images were taken. If I’m looking for a particular image, I can narrow down my search by searching for photos with the keyword for that location.
• Create a keyword hierarchy. Many image viewer programs allow nesting of keywords for greater specificity. For instance, I use a State/County/City hierarchy. This way I can find every image taken in Florida. But if I want to view just images taken in Tierra Verde, Florida, I can do that too. The nice thing is that because the keywords are nested, when I add the keyword Tierra Verde to an image, my photo viewer automatically adds the keywords Pinellas County and Florida.
• Create specialty keyword lists to further uniquely identify shots of something you have a lot of. I have a lot of wildlife shots. So I use a keyword wildlife with the following nested keywords: attacking, bathing, beak, breeding, breeding plumage, camouflage, captive, courting, dead, egg, feather, feeding, fighting, flock, flying, injured, mating, nest, open beak, parent, pooping, preening, running, scat, scratching, sleeping, stretch, tongue, wing, young. And some of those keywords have nested keywords under them. It might seem a bit excessive, but it’s easy for me to find all my shots of birds in beautiful breeding plumage. And, yes, I have a collection of shots of wildlife pooping—not for the faint of heart!
• Be careful not to duplicate keywords. It’s easy to create keywords that have similar meanings unintentionally. The keywords automobile and car might mean the same thing to you. So choose one and stick to it. This will keep your keywords more concise and make it easier to find what you’re looking for.
• Add keywords to your images as soon as you download them from your camera. Usually I will download my images, do a quick review to delete the ones I don’t want to keep and delete those, and then add keywords to the remaining images.
• Periodically export your keywords to a file so you can restore them if you have a catastrophic computer failure.

So what are you waiting for? Get your photos organized using keywords and find what you're looking for right now.