Today’s Question: I recently purchased a new computer and had a computer tech install the latest versions of Photoshop and Lightroom Classic. When I checked my Keyword List, the alphabetical list only went from “A” to “O”. Keywords starting with “P” through “Z” are missing. How can I find those other keywords (hopefully they’re not lost)?
Tim’s Quick Answer: This is a long-standing known issue with Lightroom Classic on the Windows platform. You can access keywords further down the alphabetical list using the search field, or you can organize the keywords into a hierarchy to enable access to the full list.
More Detail: The issue of not being able to see your full list of keywords in the Keyword List of the right panel in Lightroom Classic only affects Windows users (not Macintosh). From everything I’ve been able to gather, it doesn’t appear that this limitation will be fixed anytime soon, if ever.
There are two workarounds that Windows users can employ to access their full list of keywords. The first is to enter text into the Filter Keywords field at the top of the Keyword List section. For example, if you type “sta” into the field the Keyword List will only show keywords that include that string of letters, such as “starburst” and “statue”. You can click the “X” at the right side of the Filter Keywords field to clear the filter.
You could also create keyword hierarchies to work around this issue, although I don’t really recommend this approach due to the additional complexity involved. It is far too easy, for example, to accidentally drag a keyword into the wrong hierarchy. Plus, existing metadata standards don’t actually support keyword hierarchies.
If you wanted to use hierarchies to work around the Keyword List limitation, you could start by creating parent keywords. These could be categories such as “Landscapes”, “Travel”, and “People”, for example. You might also consider creating a parent keyword for each letter of the alphabet and put the actual keywords into these hierarchies based on the letter they start with.
Assuming the latter approach, you could create a keyword called “A” and then drag all keywords that start with “A” into that parent keyword. If you repeat this for every letter of the alphabet, you would be able to collapse all but one of the parent keywords, so that all keywords for a given letter can be displayed in the Keyword List. The only other requirement, of course, is that the parent keyword you’re browsing not contain more than about 1,500 keywords.
I suppose I should also add that Windows users facing this issue could also switch to using a computer running the Macintosh operating system, where the limitation does not exist. But for most I would expect that to be less desirable than using one of the above workarounds.
