Can you say in more details the kind of searches you want the keywords to aid in? Provide some real examples?

Thanks, John. That's a very good question, and I think it gets to the heart of what I'm trying to achieve.

My primary goal is to make photographs easy to find through combinations of subject matter, photographic techniques, visual characteristics, locations, events, and other metadata, without depending on their physical folder locations.

I have approximately 80,000 photographs in my Lightroom Classic catalog, with a substantial additional archive awaiting import. My photography covers a fairly wide range of subjects, including wildlife, birds, insects, flowers, macro and extreme macro photography, architecture, street photography, and events. A mix of professional photos, family photos, vacation photos, my own hobby to semi professional photos. There are photos from the early 1900's all the way to today.

Here are some examples of searches I'd like to perform:

1. Finding subjects at different levels of specificity

• All photographs of animals.
• All bird photographs, regardless of species.
• Photographs of one particular bird species.
• All insects, or specifically butterflies, dragonflies, or beetles.
• All flowering plants, or a particular flower species.

I would like the hierarchy to support both broad and specific searches without requiring me to assign every ancestor keyword manually.

2. Combining subjects with photographic techniques

• Macro photographs of insects.
• Extreme macro photographs of particular subjects.
• Macro photographs of flowers, regardless of species.
• Wildlife photographs taken with particular photographic techniques.

The important distinction is that the subject and the photographic technique should be independent. A butterfly is still a butterfly whether photographed with a macro lens or a telephoto lens.

3. Finding photographs by visual characteristics

• Photographs containing silhouettes.
• Photographs featuring reflections or symmetry.
• Images where a particular color is a dominant visual element.
• Black-and-white photographs featuring architecture or street scenes.

I want to distinguish between what a photograph depicts and how it looks. I also don't want keywords for visual characteristics that aren't particularly significant in the image.

4. Combining events, locations, and activities

• Photographs from a particular festival.
• Festival photographs showing a specific activity or subject.
• Street photography taken in a particular city.
• Wildlife photographed in a particular country or region.

I agree with the principle of keeping these dimensions independent rather than embedding locations or dates under events or activities.

5. Finding photographs of people

• Photographs featuring a particular family member.
• Photographs showing several specific people together.
• Family photographs from a particular event or location.

For this, I intend to use Lightroom Classic's existing People keywords and face recognition rather than maintain a separate system of ordinary person keywords.

6. Selecting photographs for competitions and galleries

This is an important practical use case for me.

For example, I might want to find:

• My highest-rated bird photographs.
• My best macro photographs of insects.
• Strong photographs featuring architecture, reflections, or symmetry.
• My highest-rated flower photographs from a particular period.

I would then narrow the results further using ratings, flags, dates, or other Lightroom metadata.

Why I'm considering a hierarchy

I want to be able to search broadly or narrowly, depending on the situation. For example, searching for all birds should find photographs tagged with individual bird species, while searching for a particular species should produce a more specific result.

I also want different dimensions to remain independent, so a photograph can be described by its subject, technique, location, event, and visual characteristics without duplicating entire branches of the hierarchy.

I'm not trying to replicate information Lightroom already stores reliably in searchable metadata fields, such as capture dates, camera models, or lenses.

One additional consideration

I'm also developing a Lightroom Classic plugin for AI-assisted image analysis and controlled hierarchical keyword assignment.

My experience with previous AI keywording software resulted in an enormous number of inconsistent and redundant keywords. I'm trying to avoid repeating that mistake.

For that reason, I want a well-defined vocabulary with predictable keyword placement, preferably using existing keywords whenever possible and allowing new ones only when genuinely justified.

However, I want the hierarchy to make sense independently of the plugin. It should remain useful for manual keywording, Library Filter searches, and Smart Collections.

What I'm uncertain about

I'm not particularly attached to the 14 top-level categories I originally proposed. They're a starting point rather than a final design.

My main concern is finding the right balance between a hierarchy that's detailed enough for precise searches and one that's simple enough to maintain consistently over many years.

Given these examples, do you think my proposed approach makes sense, or would you recommend organizing the keywords differently?

I'd particularly appreciate your thoughts on where hierarchical keywording provides real benefits and where I might be making things unnecessarily complicated.