It isn't necessary to include a "year" keyword....the capture date being already available in the metadata means including it in keywords as well is a bit of a redundancy. But there's no rules that say you shouldn't do it, if it works for you.....

This is a general good piece of advice: only keyword topics which you cannot cover by other filtering/searching means in LR.

With LR4 this can apply even to geographical content, thanks to the new map module. I would rather create a location "Capetown" than a general keyword.

My fashion of keywording would be "2010-Holiday-Capetown", because then you have the full *mini-diary-content* inside your keyword, and you still can filter or create a smart collection for all images,

whith condition Keywords contains (or contains words, contains all, contains words, doesn't contain, starts with, ends with) Holiday.

A matter of taste and searching habits.

Of course this advice is only valid if you can be sure to have your LR catalog available when you search.

If you want others to find stuff, without LR, just from metadata saved to the images files/sidecars, then this is a different story.

Cornelia

Hi Deon,

I can't properly read what character you are using as separator.

For me it is the simple comma, to separate 2 different keywords.

Inside one keyword I use hyphens -

as well as blanks, sometimes even a bracket ) to group persons in lieu of face recognition.

I consider these characters as native parts inside the keyword.

There may be disadvantages to that when searching for string parts inside one keyword, but I have not yet come across them.

Maybe others can share their learnings, if there are characters which you should rather not use inside one keyword?

(I refrain from semi-colon ; but this may be superstition; I sometimes change from Windows in German to English)

Cornelia