Quote Originally Posted by Tannin View Post
On the contrary, if there were significant benefits, everybody would do it.
It is my suspicion that 99.99% of photographers do not even know that keywording (tagging) exists, and don't know what it is, or what benefits it might convey for them if they do!
Sad, but probably the case, Tony.

Nowhere in this thread has there been any sensible attempt to quantify the cost of keywording. Having tried it for myself, I know for a fact that in my case (and probably in 90+ percent of other cases), on a time = money basis keywording an entire collection is the equivalent of paying $1000 a year to insure your car for $100.
The time cost when even a sizeable set of images has been uploaded is negligible. Doing it while looking at what one has caught becomes second nature - a matter of selecting a keyword from a list and L/clicking on it to apply. Since about 5% of my images are of the children (the cats, AKA Household Gods), I usually just select all of these first up and tick "Cats". That fixes that group up immediately. Then seek out groups and do similarly. It really is quite fast.

Once he actually understood the benefits to him, my brother set out from scratch to keyword all his images. He's older than I am, and usually cannot be bothered doing anything like this ...

@arthurking83 Arthur, I have installed XnViewMP on my Win7 Pro w/s. It will keyword RAW files, but only by creating XMP files, i.e. it does not embed the keywords into the actual RAW file. When one searches, it obligingly finds the XMP file, not the RAW file! I'm probably doing something wrong ...

At least Bridge finds the RAW file associated with the XMP file, rather than finding only the XMP file ...