It seems you can only add keywords to the list but you cannot edit/delete/correct them.
Greetings, Hartmut!
The screenshot does not look like the Keyword editor in the current version of Final Cut Pro.
This example comes from the online User Guide, and is consistent with my current version of FCP. It offers full editing, a “Keyword Collection” feature in the sidebar, and the option to remove subsets of keywords from a range of clips or to remove all keywords.
It looks like Apple rewrote the Keyword facility, and made it much more like what you’d use to define keyboard shortcuts.
Hope this helps!
The screenshot does not show the keywords editor but the list of available keywords you get by double-clicking an intelligent collection “Show all tags”. My example is quite a large list which is in dire need of a clean-up campaign.
I think that’s your answer: you are not showing the keywords editor. The Intelligent Collection is a fancy search engine, not a keyword editor. I do see, and you can verify this for yourself, that it is possible to “uncheck” all the keywords in the selector list and then “check” the ones you are interested in including in the collection.
The deeper answer is that an Intelligent Collection works across all the projects in a given library. So when you use “Keyword” as a criterion, it shows all keywords assigned to all clips in all projects in that library.
If you feel like you need to clean up your keywords, I’d suggest you use this feature to your advantage. Define a new Intelligent Collection to find [Include Any] Keyword. Use the popup selector to Uncheck All, then Check a keyword you no longer want to use. You’ll see all projects and clips that match that one keyword in the Browser.
Select them all, select the menu item Mark->Show Keyword Editor (or COMD-K), and delete that keyword.
It may be a little tedious, but it’s not a lot tedious compared to going through all your individual clips and finding their individual keywords.
(EDIT: A second thought: if you are interested in editing a single keyword—for example, to correct a misspelling—add the new keyword before you delete the old one. If you want to consolidate 2 or 3 keywords into one, select all the keywords in the Intelligent Collection list, add the consolidating keyword, then delete the old keywords. You must follow this pattern of adding new before deleting old or else your selection will disappear and all the clips that had that keyword will scurry away into the haystacks of your library.)
Hope this helps!
Thanks for your considerations. I was hoping to find a way to edit a list of keywords the way you can do it with the “Photos” keyword manager. Obviously this is not the case with FCP so I’ll have to apply the piecemeal strategy you described.
Yes, that would be nice if it worked that way. It suggests taking care with assigning keywords, I suppose. Unlike Photos, which is a consumer/hobbyist app, Final Cut Pro assumes that its end users are working on large projects where there is collaboration, or an overall external structure. It can handle ad hoc work quite well, but it can also handle highly complex cinematic work.
I haven’t opened iMovie in a long time, but just launched it and I notice it does not support keywords at all.
Always open to hearing if someone has a better suggestion or strategy!
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