Recreating Adobe Bridge Keywords.xml file from Image metadata

I haven’t used Adobe Bridge for quite a long time, and when I came to use it recently I found that all my hierarchical keywords had been lost. This was because I’ve had a new computer since last using it, and the location where Bridge stores the hierarchical keywords is in a location I hadn’t been backing up.

All the hierarchical keywords that had been assigned to images were still in the metadata of those images, just they weren’t in the list Bridge keeps to assign to new images. So I needed some way of pulling the hierarchical keywords from all the images and then using this to rebuild the list of keywords available in Bridge.

In this post I’ll go over how I did this. Note all my processing is done in a linux environment, but you could probably adjust my code to Windows equivalents or run it from wsl. Also note, this is not a particularly robust solution, but rather one that was ‘good enough’ for me.

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Posted on by xoogu, last updated