Hey y'all! How's everyone doing this week? Good I hope. Let me tell you I really love photography. Some parts more than others. I love taking the photo's and editing is just something I have to do. But there is one part that I really don't like and that's Keywording.  I really hate keywording. For those that don't know what keywording is its associating words with the photograph that you're working on. This is to help you find it in the future. It also helps if it's put on the internet and helps people find it. You can open up your browser in Lightroom Classic and type in a word like "dog" and if you've keyworded correctly all the photo's of dogs should show up.  But if you haven't put the keyword on the dog photo it won't show up. Now if you've been shooting for a while like me you might have 100,000 photo's in your Lightroom catalog. It would be very hard to find that dog photo that your looking for unless you can remember the date and year you took that photo. If your like me you can't remember what happened last week. LOL So keywording is important. Normally when you come back from a shoot say a city walk. When you bring your photo's into Lightroom you can put keywords that are common to all of the photo's. The name of the city, cityscape, street and maybe a few others. But if you've taken 100 photos they will all pop up if you put in the name of the city. So putting in individual keywords on each photo is the best way to keyword.  Maybe there is people in the photo. People, maybe they are wearing hats, Hats etc... But what a laborious job this is and if your like me you'll get the generic keywords in and that's it. Thats why keywording sucks! But what if AI could help?

A new keywording AI program from the company ON1. ON1 is a software editing company that has many cool products. From De-Noise and Sharpening programs that will work seamlessly with Lightroom. You use them as a plugin in Lightroom so it can easily become a part of your Workflow with not many hassles. The new Keywording AI software doesn't quite work that way. But you can open  up the program and point it at the photo's that you want to keywords to be added to and push a button and it does the work for you. In theory this is fantastic. No more keywording for me! LOL Well not quite. The Program works like this. First you open up the Program Keywording AI and find the folder that the photos are in that you want to keyword. Then you select the photos that you want keyworded. Push a scan button and the program goes to work looking at your photo's. It does take some time to analyze .  I selected 50 photo's and it took about 15 min. Now some of that slowness might be my computer. I have an old iMac a 2015 model. I know I need to update. LOL But it did find a lot of keywords. It even put the county that the photo's were taken that had GPS data associated with them. You can also put in keywords manually to add to what the AI found. Say you took a photo of Ava. The AI isn't going to know who Ava is so it won't add it. But you can easily add that keyword. Then you close the program and go to Lightroom and re-sync you folder that the photo's were in and all of the keywords that ON1 AI found will be in your photo. When you export that photo all of those keywords go with the photo. Now you can look up photo's with all of the Keywords that were added by the AI. Now is it perfect? No it isn't . It may put in some random keywords that don't match anything in your photo. I found that if I had some big billowing clouds the AI thought they were mountains. You can easily delete these. This is the first version of the program and I'm sure that with versions to come that it will be more precise and speedier.  This is a great start to solving the problem I have with keywording. 

Now I have just started using this program and don't quite know where I'm going to insert into my Photography Workflow. I will probably only keyword my winners not all of my photo's so I will put my generic keywords on import and after all of my editing is done then use ON1 Keyword AI for the winners. That's what I'm thinking now. I think that this is great software to do something that I hate doing and it will just get better with time. At the time of me writing this blog the price was 39 dollars but will probably go to 60ish soon.  Still a good deal to do a job that I don't want to .  Until next week keep shooting and get outside!