About Keywords

Keywords are used to help you and others search through many images to find what you are looking for.  You can add Keywords based on image content, client or job, location where the image was taken, or any number of other elements.  Adding Keywords to your images will allow you to search for your images by Keyword, allowing you to group all of your images that share the same keywords in one view.

Effective Use of Keywords

Searching for a the keyword "family vacation" is a lot easier than remembering what folder you put your pictures into.  But, for keywording and searching to be effective, you need to add keywords to your photos in a way that you can easily remember; if you search for "family trip" but assigned the keyword "family vacation" to your images, your search will return nothing and you won't find what you are looking for.

Before adding many keywords to your images, it is a good idea to think through and plan how you want to utilize Keywords to help you organize and categorize your images.

Keyword Hierarchies

Bibble 5 allows for Hierarchies of keywords, meaning you can group keywords together "under" other keywords.  So "Dog" and "Cat" could be grouped under "Pets" and "Mom" and "Dad" under "Family".  This allows you to more quickly find your images while keeping the list of keywords manageable by showing some or all of the keywords.

This hierarchy create a parent/child relationship between Keywords: in the example above, "Pets" is the parent Keyword, and "Dog" and "Cat" are both children of "Pets".

If you assign "Pets;Cat" to a Version, Bibble would know that "Cat" is a child of Pets.  Searching for Pets or selecting Pets from the Keyword Metadata Browser would show all Versions that contain Pets, Cat, or Dog.  Searching for Cat would only show Versions that were assigned Cat, or any child keywords to Cat.

Grouping your Keywords together into hierarchies can also allow you to use Keywords for many different types of categorizations.  For example, you could create three top level Keyword groups: "Clients", "Subject Matter", and "Genre".  Then, add new Sub-keywords to the "Clients" group for each job you work on, and add entries under "Subject Matter" for things like "Urban", "Landscapes", "Portrait", "Head-shot" and so forth.  Under "Genre" you could have "Sepia", "High Key", "Black & White", "Bleach Bypass", "High Contrast" and any number of other image treatments or photographic genres.

Then, as you import images from a new shoot for a specific client, assign to all those images the keyword "Clients;Smith Wedding".  As you edit and optimize your images, add Subject Matter Keywords.  As you make multiple Versions of your images, some in Sepia, some Black & White, tag these Versions with these Keywords.

Now, you can quickly search for any image shot as part of "Smith Wedding", or you can find all of your "High Key" images.  Or search for High Key images shot during the Smith Wedding that are Portraits.

All the keywords at a specific level in the hierarchy must be unique, but you may have the same Keyword multiple times at different places in your Keyword hierarchy.  So, you can have "John Doe" under your "Clients" heading, and "John Doe" also under your "Subjects" heading.  This allows you to distinguish between images shot of John Doe, and images shot for John Doe.  Or, you can perform a search for "John Doe" and find both.