Removing particular keywords from JPG files

[reddwarf4ever]

please read through, hopefully it will make sense

Have a big problem with light room.
Any help would be appreciated.
to Summarize, I have a Parent Keyword "Family" with many child keywords, in the keyword tag panel it shows Family as a TAG
in the metadata filter it shows "Family" as a parent keyword,
the TAG "Family" also shows in filter folders
it also shows in windows explorer TAGS
BUT if I try to delete Family ( showing as a parent keyword) it will also delete all the child keywords

Even stranger, I removed the Family tags from a small folder using a 3rd party App, ( wont work on others as they have embedded folders) but some are showing Family as a TAG, no idea why, on two images, BUT in windows explorer its NOT showing the Family tag,on these photos but DOES in lightroom.....UPDATE just realised why the Keywords had changed in the small folder, lightroom was set to update when changes are made, no doubt something i did caused this, now turned that off

I made a smart collection to show Family Keyword, says 2758 out of 3628 photos

ANy way back to ExifTool, the aforementioned may make sense to anyone with lightroom, i would appreciate thoughts on mmy problem.

But I am hoping that Exif tool will be able to remove the "Family" keyword tag from all my photos, then i can upload the metadata to lightroom and all is sorted, at least thats the plan....sorry for the long story, but this has been going on for weeks, downloaded countless programs to resolve this, nothing was satisfactory.

if exiftool can do what i want, and i think it might, is there a GUI version that will do the same

thank you

[Phil Harvey]

I think that ExifTool can probably do what you want, but I need to see the output of ExifTool to know what we are dealing with.  Can you run this command and post the output?:

Code Select Expand

exiftool -G1 -a FILE
- Phil

[StarGeek]

The tags you probably want to look for in the exiftool output are Subject, Keywords, and HierarchicalSubject.

The last one might be the one that dictates the hierarchy, but I believe that sometimes it might be part of the other two. I don't have access to the current version of LR, so I'm not sure how it currently saves the hierarchy.

Odds are it will require trimming the leading category and then you would have to tell LR to reload all the metadata.