Today’s Question: I have separate workflows for my Lightroom Classic photos and my Photoshop images. They are effectively organized by the Lightroom catalog and a Bridge folder structure. I have an extensive keyword structure in Lightroom and love how quickly and easily I can find photos. But I haven’t been able to see an entire list of assigned keywords or find a way to use them in a search of the entire Bridge folder structure. Do you have any suggestions?
Tim’s Quick Answer: You can actually add all keywords from Lightroom Classic as persistent keywords in Adobe Bridge, so that you’ll have access all keywords in both applications.
More Detail: I should point out right from the start that I don’t normally recommend using both Lightroom Classic and Adobe Bridge, due to the risk of confusion and metadata mismatches. But if you are working with completely different groups of photos with each application (or are extremely familiar with how these applications work), it can be done.
In this case I’ll assume that the two sets of photos are completely separate, even if that’s not the case, because the idea makes me feel more comfortable. But I digress.
Adobe Bridge will show you the keywords assigned to images in the current location, or for the currently selected image, for example. But Bridge also includes the concept of “persistent” keywords, which appear on the Keywords panel even if they have not been assigned to any images. This is similar to the Keyword List in Lightroom Classic.
If you’d like to make your full Keyword List from Lightroom Classic in Bridge, you can export from Lightroom Classic and import to Bridge.
To get started, in Lightroom Classic go to the Library module and from the menu choose Metadata > Export Keywords > Exclude Keyword Tag Options. In the dialog that appears you can enter a meaningful name for the exported file, and choose a convenient location to save it.
Once you’ve exported the keywords from Lightroom Classic, go to Bridge and click on the panel popup menu (the three horizontal lines) on the right side of the tab for the Keywords panel. From the popup menu choose Import (or choose “Clear and Import” if you want to clear out all persistent keywords from the Keywords panel and replace them with the keywords from Lightroom Classic). Navigate to the location where you saved the keyword export from Lightroom Classic, select the file you exported, and click the Open button. Note that importing keywords into Bridge in this way will not cause any existing keywords to be removed from your images, even if you used the “Clear and Import” option.
At this point you will have the full keywords list from Lightroom Classic available on the Keywords panel in Bridge. Just keep in mind that these lists won’t stay synchronized automatically. Therefore, if you want to update the lists I recommend adding keywords in Lightroom Classic and then repeat the import process in Bridge using the “Clear and Import” option.
