I have approximately 700 keywords. Maybe 1/5 - 1/4 are two worded with a space. A very few have 3-6 words. All these have a space. I did not know I had to put an underscore between them. I have 6,200 photo files on CD and external hard drive. Each of these files has an average of 8 keywords on it. I do not have Lightroom yet. I plan to get Lightroom4 very soon. I have my keyword list made up. I have about 4 categories that have subcategories with a keyword child. The rest of my categories (about 7) have a category heading and keywords listed under. I can insert a underscore here between the two worded keywords, but it would be very hard to go back and look through all my files on external hard drive and find and change the two worded keywords listed with every file. I have read that Lightroom's Auto Complete does not list two worded keywords very well (it would be too slow for me to schroll down the keyword tree) and Lightroom returns too many hits with two worded keywords that have spaces. (It sees both words as a separate keyword and returns hits on these separate keywords. It does not see the two keywords as being one unified search term without an underscore between them.) I need cleaner results than this.
Will fixing my keyword list with underscores before I implement the list into Lightroom fix this problem?...even though my keywords on the imported pictures do not have underscores. [Because I hope to import my previous work of 6,200 files (which is mostly Nikon Tiff from my D100 camera) into Lightroom and not have to re-keyword it. I hoping those keywords already attached to the files show up in Lightroom after import, and among them would be the two worded keywords with spaces, not with underscores]
Thank You for helping me get all these kinks worked out, but I fear this is more than a kink.
Thank You Very Much for any help,
Sandy