Nested hierarchy keywords

[Athelstan100]

Hello Lightroom people

I'm pretty new to Lightroom but I'm busy cataloging around 23,000 photos and in terms of accessing stuff I'm trying to use keywords to identify photos for search purposes. It's a bit of a learning curve...

The thing I have most trouble with (because it just doesn't seem to make sense to me) relates to keywords, in particular when I tag faces.  I have various keywords, and there's a whole area about people - Friends and Family being the two main folders into which I put people when I tag them or on the rare occasion (after a lot of recognition runs) that LR actually suggests a name that's right.

Here's the problem: I've just imported about 300 photos after a trip and several of them have pictures of my wife. LR suggested her name for quite a few of them. I accepted this. However it missed some (some of them 99% the same picture as ones it caught - wtf?!) and so I selected the ones it missed to enter the tag manually. However, when I did so it suggested two options when I copied the name into the box: 1) [wife's name] and 2) [wife's name]>Family.   This leads me to believe that LR is basically trying to store two versions of the same tag - one in the root and one in Family. So every now and again I have to search for all the ones in root and copy them to the family one, and then delete the root version. Which LR then recreates next time it detects [wife's name]'s face and I have to do it again.

I fully realise user error may be the nub of this problem but telling LR to put new people in my family will still mean a new manual process to take many out again and put them in Friends, or whatever. So I've looked at that potential answer but can't see a real solution.

Is my problem that LR doesn't do nested hierarchies (ie more than 1 level)?

[johnrellis · Accepted solution]

LR's face tagging always puts new person keywords under whichever parent keyword is currently designated.  You can designate a new parent (e.g. Family) by right-clicking Family in the Keyword List panel and selecting Put New Person Keywords Inside This Keyword.

However, if you are entering a new person as a face tag and you want it go somewhere else, type the parent explicitly, e.g. instead of typing "Harry" (which would go under Harry < Family by default), type "Harry < Friends" or "Friends > Harry".