If you photograph birds and use Lightroom, you will probably be interested in tagging and keywording accurate species information on your photos.

The idea is you add the keyword of the bird species to an image, and Lightroom adds the family, scientific and international names to your keywords when you export to Photoshop, or anywhere else.

Each species has the official British name, scientific name and international English name (if applicable).

To make the list more useful for keywording, I have added family information into the hierarchy, which will also be included when you export.

So, if you were to add "Arctic Skua" to your photo then export it, the keywords will contain "Arctic Skua, Stercorarius parasiticus, Parasitic Jaeger, Skuas, Stercorariidae".

Installation

IMPORTANT: I recommend that you back-up your Lightroom database before importing these keywords, especially if you already have species keywords.

1. After downloading, unzip the text file into a folder on your computer. For example, My Documents.

2. Open Lightroom, Library module and select Metadata->import keywords.

3. Navigate to where you saved the keyword file and press "Open".


4.After the import has finished you should have a top-level keyword (e.g. "The British List by family") - expand that to see all the species organised by family.


5. You just add the species name to your species and Lightroom will add the rest when you export.

Download

I recommend that you only install one of these libraries in a Lightroom catalog - installing more than one will introduce duplicate keywords. Whilst this will not cause any problems for Lightroom, it may lead to inconsistent keyword data across your images.

British Birds

Flat list of species (no family keywords):
The British List (LR_British_List_Flat_20081103.zip)

With family hierarchy:
The British List by family (LR_British_List_Family_20081103.zip)

North American Birds

Flat list of species (no family keywords):
North American Birds (LR_USA_List_Flat_20081103.zip)

With family hierarchy:
North American Birds by family (LR_USA_List_Family_20081103.zip)

Western Palearctic Birds (English)

Flat list of species (no family keywords):
Western Palearctic Birds (LR_WP_List_Flat_20081117.zip)

With family hierarchy:
Western Palearctic Birds by family (LR_WP_List_Family_20081117.zip)

Western Palearctic Birds (Italian)

Flat list of species (no family keywords):
Western Palearctic Birds - Italian (LR_WP_List_Flat_Italian_20081117.zip)

With family hierarchy:
Western Palearctic Birds by family - Italian (LR_WP_List_Family_Italian_20081117.zip)

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