Today’s Question: You showed us in several videos how to correct a misspelled keyword in Lightroom with a right click. However, if the word is also listed correctly and you try to change the misspelled one, Lightroom will tell you that word is already used and won’t let you change it. So how do I fix those?
Tim’s Quick Answer: In this scenario you will need to filter based on the misspelled keyword, add the correct keyword from the Keyword List, and then delete the misspelled keyword from the Keyword List.
More Detail: Lightroom enables you to quickly correct a misspelled keyword for multiple photos by simply editing the misspelled keyword tag on the Keyword List found on the right panel in the Library module. However, if the correct spelling already exists as a keyword, Lightroom won’t let you edit the misspelled keyword to the correct spelling. So you’ll need to first add the correctly spelled keyword and then delete the misspelled keyword. Fortunately that process is also quite simple.
Start by filtering all of your images that have the misspelled keyword. You can do this very quickly by hovering your mouse over the misspelled keyword in the Keyword List on the right panel in the Library module, and then clicking on the right-pointing arrow that appears to the right of the number indicating how many images have that keyword applied. This will take you to the All Photographs collection with a filter applied for the keyword you selected.
To apply the correctly spelled keyword to the photos you’ve filtered, you’ll first need to select all of them. You can do that by choosing Edit > Select All from the menu (or pressing Ctrl+A on Windows or Command+A on Macintosh). You need to be in the Grid view (rather than the Loupe view), but this will have been set automatically when you applied the filter based on the misspelled keyword.
To add the correctly spelled keyword to the selected photos, you need to turn on the checkbox for that keyword on the Keyword List. So, click in the space to the left of the correct keyword so that a checkmark appears there. Note that if the correctly spelled keyword had already been applied to some of the selected images you’ll see a dash rather than an empty space to the left of the keyword on the Keyword List.
Now that the correct version of the keyword has been applied to all images that had the incorrectly spelled version applied, you can delete the keyword with the incorrect spelling. To do so simply right-click on the incorrectly spelled keyword on the Keyword List and choose Delete from the popup menu that appears.