About the Photo Gallery
Our digital photo collection is powered by Lightroom Nested Keywords, an open-source project written and customized by our talented volunteers.
- Visit the open-source repository on GitHub: Lightroom Nested Keywords
- Contact the software developer: Barry Hansen, barry.hansen@gmail.com
Our museum manages the digital photos using Adobe Lightroom, which is a wonderful organizing tool for very large groups of photos. It can easily handle many thousands of images and offers several powerful tools to quickly find things. An especially good method is to tag images with keywords. You can organize keywords into a tree structure (hierarchies) to represent, for example: Locations > Named Places > Aurora Village.
However, a limitation of Lightroom is its organizational schemes can only be used on the single workstation running its software. Although Lightroom can publish photos to the web, and it can embed keywords in metadata, the website it publishes does not have any features to navigate by keyword on the web. The “Lightroom Nested Keywords” project fills that need with easy and intuitive keyword navigation.
About the Keyword Taxonomy
Our structured keyword hierarchy is designed by Ken Winnick specifically for museum collections.
- Visit the keyword tree: Shoreline Historical Keyword Index
- Contact the designer: Ken Winnick, Visual Cognetics, visualcognetics@outlook.com
Ken designed the taxonomy (or controlled vocabulary, structured keywords) suitable for our museum’s digital photo collection. He also developed a Photo Mechanic strategy and work flow, then guided a team of volunteers to work in parallel to apply keywords to thousands of photos. The project would not have started, much less have been successful without him.