Hierarchical Keywords

I am currently uploading several thousand images into the Lightroom database. This is taking several hours, so I am busy exploring the database functions within Lightroom and have discovered the concept of hierarchical keywording.

Imagine a photo of a brown pelican taken off the shore of the Gulf Coast, Texas in 2002, using my old Nikon F5. The only keywords I need to enter are: 2002, F5, Padre Island National Seashore, and Brown Pelican. This is becase the camera belongs to my camera>Nikon>F5 branch, Padre Island belongs to my America>USA>Texas>Gulf Coast>Padre Island National Seashore branch, and the bird belongs to Bird>Brown Pelican. The photo will come up in a broader serach, for example, Gulf Coast + Bird, without either of these keywords needing to be entered into the image database.

This nesting of keywords means (1) that the system is much less randomly organized, (2) that I am forced to think about the structure of potential search requests, and (3) that a lot fewer keywords need to be entered, thus saving a lot of time.

This is going to be one of the reasons that Lightroom will prove to be a huge success with photographers.