Keyword master – a powerful keywording assistant for Lightroom

Update: version 1.10 of Keyword Master is now compatible with Lightroom 2. This post has been updated accordingly.

Keywording is a very important practice for photographers who sell their images on line; images that can’t be found are images that won’t sell.

Even those who sell photographic services gain from good keywording since it increases the likelyhood that clients will find their portfolios, and thus their web sites.

The problem with keywording is that it’s a long and laborious process. It’s hard to think of keywords, and it’s time consuming to type them in.

My new plugin – Keyword Master – helps to relieve these issues by providing photographers with a tool to help them gather or harvest keywords from other sources.

The concept is simple: use the the best resource available to you – the Internet. Search for similar images on-line and then cut and paste the keywords you find into Keyword Master. Keyword Master significantly improves your workflow by automatically removing any formatting and punctuation, thus extracting the keywords from the text. Common words and duplicates are removed.

This gives the photographer a fantastic starting point to work from. It’s much quicker and easier to start with a bunch of keywords and then remove the irrelevant ones than it is to create new ones from scratch.

Lightroom 3 users have an extra advantage: once the keyword list is ready, Keyword Master can apply the keywords to the selected images. For advanced keyworders – such as those who use a controlled vocabulary – Keyword Master will help you to ensure that you reuse any keywords that are already defined in your hierarchy.