North American Birds: best Lightroom keyword list available?

[Nancy Phillips]

preferably with current binomial (plus order and family) as well as common-usage hierarchical terms. I have identified one such keyword list from "rusticolus" in the UK. Is there an ornithologist-preferred LR keyword list?

[John Chardine]

Hi Nancy- I've developed one for Photo Mechanic but it won't work with LR.

[Nancy Phillips]

John, I finally sat down with a book on Birds in the Saint Louis (MO) Region, copied the species list, got the current Linnaean terms from American Ornithological Union, and typed the 300 or so species into my custom keyword list. Simple but tedious, except for the reading of details of sightings in the BoSTLR book, in between the dull typing.

[John Chardine]

Well done Nancy.

I use the Code Replacement feature of Photo Mechanic. I can pull out a substring from the file name or any data field in the image file and then automatically look that string up in a text file and replace any data field with the lookup data. For example, for birds and common mammals I photograph, I use the 4-letter code for the species as developed and used for years by the Bird Banding Office. Each species has a code that you can work out from the English name of the species. E.g., American Robin is AMRO. My file names are date_time_species code_image number.cr2, e.g., 20121212_121212_AMRO_1234.cr2. I can ask Photo Mechanic to parse AMRO out of the filename, go look the code up in a text file, and replace/add to the contents of the IPTC Keyword field for the image with the lookup info for AMRO, which in my case is: Aves, PASSERIFORMES, Turdidae, American Robin, Turdus migratorius.

I am not sure how LR does this.

[Chris Harrison]

A late reply, but it is a fairly simple matter to make your own LR keyword lists in MS Excel or a similar program.
Just find an online list of the birds (or whatever else you are looking for - here's a birdlist - http://www.birdlist.org/nam/north_america.htm), cut and paste the columns into Excel and arrange them how you want.
Here's where I learned how to do this - http://lightroomsecrets.com/2009/04/building-keyword-lists-outside-of-lightroom/

It is helpful to export your current LR keyword list, look at its format then format your new additions in the same way.
Make sure you append/include your current LR keywords into the list, then save as a txt file and import into LR.

I have done this with the birds of NA, the Reptiles and Amphibians of the world, and the Mammals of the world (down to family). I got all of my lists from cutting and pasting from online. For the birds I used a txt file output from Avisys, which I use to keep my bird records anyway.