Lightroom and keywords
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I noticed a lot of confusion on how Adobe Lightroom handles keywords. People feel they keyworded in lightroom but after uploading their photos to a website the keywords are missing.

Here are a few possible reasons on why

 

keywords are only added on export

The most important reason is a design choice by Adobe the developers of Lightroom. By definition is Lightroom non destructive. This means that Lightroom never modifies a photo in its catalog.

Any change you make to a photo, i.e. brightness, color and also keywords, is stored in the database. The only time these changes are applied to a photo is when it is exported from Lightroom.

What does this mean?

If you have raw files in your catalog, then a problem is not very likely. If you need jpg your only option is to export and your keywords will be included in your jpg.

But having jpg's in your catalog is where it gets confusing. You already have the jpg on disc, so why would you want to export again. Simply upload the jpg and you're done, right? Well no, because Lightroom never changed the jpg to include the keywords. Doing that would conflict with design decision.

So always use export to get your photos out of Lightroom

Lightroom keywords not marked as "include on export"

A second reason that often causes missing keywords is a little mark in the properties of a keyword.

In lightroom you can also use keywords for personal or administrive use, that you don't want to include on export for a photo agency. I use this for example with names of family and friends. I want to be able to search for them in the catalog, but they don't need to be included on export. When you right-click on a keyword in the keyword list, there is an option "Edit keyword tag". There is an "include on export" tick box that is selected by default. Most often this setting is turned off by accident.

There was however a bug in the first Lightroom 2 version, that caused the "include on export" to be turned off for all keywords when converting a Lightroom 1 catalog to lightroom 2.