The best way to add keywords to files is the Keyword Panel. It has many time-saver features including direct access to your
Thesaurus.
The thesaurus is the feature in IMatch which allows you to control which levels of your hierarchical keywords you want to put into your files.
If you declare People and Household as
group levels, only "ann" will be written to the hierarchical keywords and the flat keywords in your images.
See the corresponding help for the Keyword Panel and the Thesaurus, which explain this in detail, with examples and recommendations when to use what.
Hierarchical keyword like WHO|people|family|ann must be written (synchronized) into the 'flat' keywords maintained by XMP and IPTC. But
how? Only the leaf-level (ann)? All levels? Each level as an individual keyword?
How should a 3rd party software or service later know that the keyword "ann" in IPTC/XMP is actually the hierarchical keyword WHO|people|family|ann? Where is the relation?
Some users prefer to write only the leaf-level, others want to write the full path (usually better because it makes your keywords independent from whatever application you use).
Some people consider only
WHO in
WHO|people|family|ann a group level, others consider
WHO|people as group levels. (A group level is not written to keywords by IMatch).
IMatch manages all this via the
Thesaurus (accessible via the Keywords and Metadata Panel).
Here you can declare which levels in your keyword hierarchy are group levels, you can define push-down keywords, synonyms and all that.
You can also control how IMatch maps hierarchical keywords (if you store these in full in your files) to the flat keywords in IPTC/XMP. You can write WHO|people|family|ann into XMP hierarchical keywords but only "ann" into the flat keywords.
And when IMatch imports a flat keyword from IPTC/XMP like "ann" it uses the thesaurus to figure out that this "ann" actually maps to the hierarchical keyword WHO|people|family|ann.
Or maybe also to "FRIENDS|ann" or "BUSINESS|colleagues|ann".?
Note: How IMatch maps hierarchical keywords to flat keywords is controlled via
Edit > Preferences > Metadata and the associates help for details. Just press <F1> in this dialog.
Complicated: Indeed. Not my fault. Always better to keep things simple.
You wrote:
QuoteBut by working in that wat there are also keywords added to my files I don't want.
Think again why you don' 'want' the full keyword WHO|people|family|ann in your files.
It's understandable, it's distinct, it's context-free and independent from external information like a thesaurus or whatever PS stores in his database etc.
If you later switch to another DAM, the other DAM will have a hard time figuring out what the keyword "ann" in your files really means - because it does not has the
context knowledge you have managed in your PS database or the IMatch thesaurus.
IMatch offers many features which allows you control which parts of hierarchical keywords you want in your files, and how to map between hierarchical and flat keywords. And how to map them back again into your hierarchy. See the IMatch help from details.
Tip: If you used Photo Supreme before, have a good look at the keywords in your files. Make sure that the hierarchical keywords in the file are properly synchronized with the flat keywords in XMP and, if your files contain legacy IPTC data, also in the IPTC record. There is always potential for problems.
Then setup your IMatch thesaurus (you can fill it e.g. from a controlled vocabulary or from the keywords already in your files) and setup your group levels.
See this knowledge-base article for additional information: Free Controlled Vocabularies for IMatch (https://www.photools.com/4588/free-controlled-vocabularies-imatch/)
As I said, you can just declare these levels as group levels in the Thesaurus and IMatch will not make them part of keywords - if you use the Keyword Panel!
If you instead manually assign files to the @Keywords|People|ann, IMatch will create exactly this keyword.