For those of you who keyword, I would love to hear more on what keyword strategies you use.
I have tried to keyword my pictures, but honestly I have found relatively little need. .... However I have been curious to know if it would benefit my workflow.
I think a lot depends on what you do with your photos. I do commercial work, and I also combine photos into fine art. Sometime several photos will be combined into one image, or many photos will become a book or a series.
Honestly, for the commercial work, I don't do a lot of keywording. If I do multiple jobs for single client I will put the client's name as a keyword, and the "Object" I photographed for them. For the most part I just pull all of their images into a single collection, sometimes organized by dates.
However, for my personal and art stuff I keyword extensively.
For instance, for my Aunt Bev... she gets the keywords "Bev", "[her surname]", "Family", and "Place Name", plus the event if applicable. As well, anyone else who appears in the photo.
If I want to browse all of my family photos... I search on "Family". If I want to browse all of the Christmas trips... easy. If I want to browse every photo that my wife appears in regardless of dates or events...I search on her name. So now a photo of my Aunt Bev, at Christmas, with my wife is in searchable several different ways. I don't have to decide if I want to slot that photo into Christmas, or Family, or Aunt Bev, or my wife. It is, in effect, slotted into all of them. I can also search for all photos where my Aunt Bev
and my wife appeared together, regardless of the event. In this case I don't have to remember which times she visited us, and when we visited her. I just search on Bev and my wife's name.
For my art stuff I have a system that allows me to pull out the themes and subjects. Different keywords for different people. There are some really good articles on the Adobe site on keywording strategies, and I become a believer after spending an afternoon reading. My library is not huge but it goes back a number of years and I can't rely on my memory as much as I would like. Plus I hated deciding where a photo went when it could go in several different spots. I used to make copies, but then I'd get frustrated trying to find the one I had cropped, rather than the duplicate.
One trick to keywording in Lr is that you can nest keywords. So...
Famly>{surname}>Bev
If I add the keyword Bev, it will
also add {surname} and Family to the image. You can also create synonyms. So Canine = Dog .... use one and the other is added as well. Works well in situations where you something has two names and you can't remember which name you like to use.
Hope this helps.