Add keywords

Keywords describe what is in a photo, so you can find it later. They are flat words or short phrases, not a tree. You add them in the Keywords section of the info panel, on the right of the Catalog workspace.

Add a keyword

1. Select one or more photos. Everything you do here applies to all of them.
2. Click Add keyword…, type a word, and press Enter. Type several separated by commas to add them together.

As you type, a list offers keywords already in the catalog (anything that contains what you typed, in either case). An existing keyword keeps its spelling, so Iceland and iceland are one keyword.

Remove a keyword

Click the × on its chip. With several photos selected, a chip with a dashed edge is on only some of them; its × removes it from all of them.

Reuse a recent keyword

Under the field, the Recent row shows the keywords most recently created in this catalog that the photo doesn’t have yet. Click one to add it.

Use suggested keywords

When you select a single photo, a Suggested row can appear with dashed “+” chips: keywords DarkRay thinks fit what it sees. Point at a chip to see how likely it is. Click one to add it.

To accept the likely ones for many photos at once, select them and choose Image › Apply Suggested Keywords (in the grid). It adds, for each photo, only the suggestions it is fairly sure of. Nothing is ever added unless you click a chip or run that command.

Suggestions need the photo to be indexed first. DarkRay does that in the background after you import or open a catalog, and File › Build Content Index runs it on demand. See Search.

Find photos by keyword

Type kw:iceland in the search row, or click a keyword in the Keyword value column. Plain words you type in the search row match keywords too, along with file names, captions and place names.

Undo

Image › Undo (Ctrl+Z by default) takes back a keyword change in the grid. Keywords that were created stay in the catalog’s list.

Note

DarkRay has no box for typing a caption yet. Captions can be set from scripts and AI assistants (see Scripting & MCP), and the search row finds them.

Technical details: where suggestions come from

Suggestions are not stored. Each time you select a photo, DarkRay compares its stored content embedding with a list of 188 terms grouped like Group > Subgroup > Keyword, and shows up to eight that score at least 2%. Apply Suggested Keywords adds those that score at least 10%. A chip adds the last part of the term’s path as the keyword.

The list is a plain text file, vocabulary.txt, in the program’s assets/keywords folder; you can edit it. [CHECK: where this file lives in the installed beta, and whether users should edit it there]