Today’s Question: I saw your excellent tip for correcting misspelled keywords in Lightroom Classic. But when I attempted to correct one keyword I got a message that I couldn’t make the change because the keyword with the correct spelling already existed. Is there a way to work around this problem?
Tim’s Quick Answer: In this scenario rather than correcting the misspelled keyword you’ll need to add the correctly spelled keyword to all images that have the incorrectly spelled keyword, and then delete the misspelled keyword altogether.
More Detail: Lightroom Classic makes it very easy to correct a misspelled keyword. You start by right-clicking on the keyword in the Keyword List on the right panel in the Library module and choosing “Edit Keyword Tag” from the popup menu. You can then correct the spelling of the keyword, and click the Save button. Not only will the keyword be updated on the Keyword List, but it will also be updated in the metadata for all images that included the misspelled keyword.
However, if you have two spellings for the same keyword, you won’t be able to simply correct the misspelled keyword. Instead, you’ll need to add the correct keyword to the affected images, and then delete the misspelled keyword.
To get started, hover your mouse over the keyword that is misspelled on the Keyword List. Then click the right-pointing arrow to the right of the keyword to set a filter so you will only be viewing photos that have the misspelled keyword applied to them. Then switch to the grid view display by pressing the letter “G” on the keyboard, so you can update multiple photos.
Next, choose Edit > Select All from the menu to select all of the photos with the misspelled keyword. Then, on the Keyword List, click the checkbox to the left of the correctly spelled keyword to add that keyword to all of the photos. Once you’ve added the correctly spelled keyword to the images, you can right-click on the misspelled keyword and choose Delete from the popup menu, in order to delete that keyword. The result will be that the misspelled keyword will have been replaced with the correctly spelled keyword for the affected images.