Stop Drowning in Photos: Let AI Audit Your Lightroom Keywords

How I used ChatGPT to clean up my Lightroom Classic keywords

I love shooting. I don’t love organizing. And for years my Lightroom catalog showed it.

Search for “Nature” and you’d get maybe half of what you were looking for. The rest was tagged “Landscape”, or “Outdoors”, or for some reason just “Trees”. Fixing that used to mean an evening of scrolling through Lightroom’s keyword panel, which is not the nicest part of the program.

Then I tried something simple. I exported my keyword list, gave it to an AI chatbot and asked it to review the structure the way a professional archivist would. It didn’t touch my catalog. It just told me what was wrong, and I fixed it myself.

Below is the exact workflow and the prompt I used. It works with ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude.

Why catalogs get messy

Keywords are what make an archive searchable. Once a photo drops out of “Recently Added”, the keywords are pretty much the only way you’ll find it again.

Photo by John on Unsplash

Most of us do add keywords. We just don’t add them the same way every time.

One year you tag a photo Travel > Europe > France. The next year you just type France. Do that a few hundred times and you end up with split hierarchies, where the same place or subject lives in two or three spots, and the one shot you need is never where you look first.

The fix: an AI audit

You don’t need a paid plugin for this. You need the keyword data you already have and access to a chatbot.

The idea is to export your keyword structure, let the AI critique it, and then use that critique as a checklist while you clean up the catalog by hand.

Step 1: Export your keywords from Lightroom

Lightroom Classic can save your whole keyword tree as a plain text file, which is exactly what the AI needs.

1. Open Lightroom Classic and go to the Library module.
2. In the top menu, choose Metadata > Export Keywords…
3. Save the file as lightroom_keywords.txt somewhere easy to find, like your desktop.

Note: If you open the file you’ll see tab indentation. The tabs are what show which keyword sits under which. Don’t edit the spacing, because the AI uses it to understand your hierarchy.

Step 2: Ask for a review, not a rewrite

Don’t paste the list into the chat box. With thousands of lines you can lose the formatting or hit the length limit. Attach the text file to your message instead.

Then ask the AI to act as a consultant and look for specific problems: inconsistencies, duplicates and keywords filed in the wrong place.

Attach lightroom_keywords.txt and use this prompt:

I am a photographer using Adobe Lightroom Classic.
I have attached a text file containing my current keyword hierarchy,
where indentation represents parent/child relationships.

Please act as a professional Digital Asset Manager and Taxonomy Expert.

Analyze my keyword structure for the following:

Inconsistencies: Identify singular vs. plural
mismatches (e.g., 'Bird' vs. 'Birds').

Redundancies: Find synonymous keywords located in
different parts of the hierarchy.

Categorization Logic: Suggest structural improvements
where specific keywords are categorized under the wrong parent.

Expansion: Suggest 5–10 missing high-level categories
based on the subjects present.

Provide your output as a structured report with actionable bullet points.
Do not rewrite the entire list; first, critique the current state.

The last line matters. If you let it rewrite the list straight away, you get a wall of keywords and no idea what changed or why.

Step 3: Read the report

The actual report I got back for my own library

You’ll get a report back, and it will probably point out things you stopped seeing years ago, like:

• Split hierarchies: Locations > Europe > France in one place and Travel > France in another.
• Mixed levels of detail: specific flower species sitting right next to broad terms like “Nature”.
• Formatting: the same keyword capitalized two or three different ways.

The mess is still there, but now it’s a list you can work through.

Step 4: Clean up by hand

Some guides tell you to have the AI rewrite the file and import it back into Lightroom. I wouldn’t. It’s risky, and it often creates duplicate keywords that leave the list more cluttered than before.

What works for me is to take the AI’s suggestions and make the changes in Lightroom myself. Say the report says you have both “Architecture” and “Buildings” and you want to keep “Architecture”:

1. Show the photos with the old keyword. In the Keyword List, hover over “Buildings” and click the small arrow to the right of its photo count. The grid now shows only those photos. Select them all with Cmd/Ctrl + A.
2. Add the keyword you’re keeping. With the photos still selected, tick the box next to “Architecture”, or drag the photos onto it.
3. Remove the old one. Still with everything selected, untick the box next to “Buildings”.
4. Delete the empty keyword. “Buildings” should now show zero photos. Right-click it and delete it.

Do the same for each item in the report. It might take you 20 minutes, and your catalog will be tidier than it has been in years.

Wrapping up

The AI didn’t organize my photos for me, and I wouldn’t want it to. What it did was look at a list I’d stopped seeing clearly and tell me where the problems were.

Let the AI find the mess. Clean it up yourself.

The payoff is a catalog where a search actually finds what you’re looking for, whether that’s for your own portfolio or for a client who wants that one shot from three years ago.