selective removal of keywords?

[Neil]

Thanks.

Will this also eliminate the duplicate keywords?

It's pretty random which words got added how many times to which files.

Thanks again.

[StarGeek]

Will this also eliminate the duplicate keywords?

It will remove all keywords that are an exact match.  If there are duplicates of keywords that you are keeping, they will remain. FAQ #17 may be useful in preventing duplicates in the first place.

Or you could be like me and remove duplicates when I'm done with that set of pictures and use the NoDups helper function.

It should also be noted that keywords might be in the XMP:Subject tag, depending upon the software you're using.  That would require a similar operation.

[Neil]

Thank you StarGeek

Excellent information and guidance.

The tip about the IPTC:Keywords AND don't forget the XMP:Subject tags was spot on. They were both there, both the same.
I've ended up with 71 wrong keywords so far, and I haven't scanned the whole library yet. That's a lot of cleaning up.

NoDups I will look into. I'm more concerned about the wrong keywords than duplicates of the correct ones.
I suspect the duplicate keywords shouldn't impact storage, function or performance that much.

Again, thank you.

[StarGeek]

NoDups I will look into. I'm more concerned about the wrong keywords than duplicates of the correct ones.
I suspect the duplicate keywords shouldn't impact storage, function or performance that much.

I haven't done much testing with various programs, but I agree the impact should be minimal.

In the actual file, it will only add a few bytes.  In a simple image viewer, should be no difference.  Maybe a bit of impact in a Digital Asset Management (DAM) program.  It would be hoped for that when a DAM program re-writes data to the file it would consolidate the keywords, but if I recall correctly, I checked once using Adobe Bridge and it did not do so.

[reddwarf4ever]

To remove keywords "one" and "two" from all images in directory "DIR":

[tt]exiftool -keywords-=one -keywords-=two DIR[/tt]

(that is assuming that they are stored in the IPTC keywords.  Read FAQ 2 and 3 to figure out the tag name you should actually use.)

- Phil

If I specify a folder, images, but there are subfolders, will this command continue recursively through the folder hierarchy or do I need to add something to achieve this, thanks

[StarGeek]

You have to add the -r (-recurse) option.