Auto-tagger and mapping to Thesaurus hierarchy

[plastikman]

I am trying to figure out how to have Auto-tagger sourced keywords properly map to my Thesaurus hierarchy. The wording in settings suggests it is able to do this but I can't get it to work in practice.

When using it, it correctly finds the entries that have a Thesaurus listing. However, when assigning, they don't follow the hierarchy of the Thesaurus and they end up as single keywords at the top of @Keywords. E.g. "bridge" is assigned instead of "Objects|bridge". This wreaks havoc in my @Keywords panel because all of the single entries end up between the group level keywords making navigation a mess. Manually cleaning that up defeats the purpose and time savings. I do have "do not assign as flat keyword" enabled for most of these grouping so maybe this causes the problem.

I have attached screenshots of my settings. Maybe I am missing something or have a setting wrong?

p.s. I am still considering just completely forgetting about hierarchical keywords and just using groups in Thesaurus and keeping the rest flat. At the end does it matter if something has banana, fruit or fruit|banana. Or if something a word with double meaning is only represented by the word, at the end that is what you use in search anyway. Hierarchical keywords keep giving me more headaches than they solve.

[Mario]

You say you have a thesaurus entry Objects|bridge. Is Objects a group-level keyword or a normal keyword?
When you enter bridge as a keyword in the Keyword panel, IMatch adds what to the file?

[Jingo]

p.s. I am still considering just completely forgetting about hierarchical keywords and just using groups in Thesaurus and keeping the rest flat. At the end does it matter if something has banana, fruit or fruit|banana. Or if something a word with double meaning is only represented by the word, at the end that is what you use in search anyway. Hierarchical keywords keep giving me more headaches than they solve.

It matters if you have "Bridge" and want to know narrow to a specific.  Is the image really: Objects|Bridge  or   Events|Games|Cards|Bridge  or   Other|Yoga|Bridge   or.....

[plastikman]

In either way your search keyword in any other application will be bridge. Or bridge + game. If hierarchical keywords are so important, why don't stock photography sites not use them?

The main befits I see is purely organizational in IMatch (@Keywords).

[Mario]

Stock photo business don't use hierarchcial keywords because of their users. And because many of them are still based on legacy IIM3 IPTC metadata - so, no hierarchies.
Hierarchies are great if you need them. For taxonomies. For complex scientific or tech keywording. But for most normal users, flat keywords do work as well and are much simpler to deal with.

[plastikman]

You say you have a thesaurus entry Objects|bridge. Is Objects a group-level keyword or a normal keyword?
When you enter bridge as a keyword in the Keyword panel, IMatch adds what to the file?

After some trial and error I found the problem (it is one from my point of view). See attached screenshots for clarification.

When "Exclude in flat keywords" is enabled for a given keyword in the Thesaurus for a hierarchical keyword in the path(e.g. boat in my screenshot), flat keywords are mapped/written by the Auto-tagger and the path is lost. When "Exclude in flat keywords" is disabled for a given keyword (e.g. canal in my screenshot), the hierarchy is correctly written. This creates a big mess in @Keywords since the whole structure is filled with double keywords.

From my point of view, this is a bug/erroneous behavior. The auto-tagger should always map the full Thesaurus path from the leaf level backwards, the same as would happen with manual assignment.

[Mario]

If you deliberately exclude keywords that way, the thesaurus no longer sees them when mapping flat keywords back.
Don't use this option. I has been added for very specific purposes and is not necessarily compatible with all fringe cases or features. I can only do so much, sorry.
And it is a very good way to shot yourself in the foot when you just enable it because you consider it useful at a specific moment. It can have dire consequences down the road when you no longer remember and then report mapping bugs and we all have to spend time digging into this.


Yes. I know. You have your reasons to explicitly and deliberately leave out some hierarchical keyword levels when flattening. But then the behavior in the reverse lookup is what you get.