Home · Register · Join Upload & Sell

Moderated by: Fred Miranda

New fredmiranda.com Mobile Site

New Feature: SMS Notification alert

New Feature: Buy & Sell Watchlist

FM Forums | Post-processing & Printing | Join Upload & Sell

Anyone with experience with Excire Foto?

chiron
Offline
• • • •
Upload & Sell: On

p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · Anyone with experience with Excire Foto?

Has anyone here used Excire Foto--an AI based program to organize, tg, and find photos in Lightroom?

How well does it work, how much does it miss, what are its strengths and weaknesses? I am thinking fo using it to try to organize a large group of photos that will be imported into LR.

Thanks.

Dec 31, 2022 at 09:22 PM

Zenon Char
Offline
• • • • •
Upload & Sell: On

p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · Anyone with experience with Excire Foto?

Does it mess with the LrC catalogue? If so the next catalogue upgrade might be affected.

Jan 01, 2023 at 10:21 AM

Zenon Char
Offline
• • • • •
Upload & Sell: On

p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · Anyone with experience with Excire Foto?

I checked the site and it does not mention LrC compatible. Things like this would concern me. If you use this feature then you will have exclamation marks saying missing photos back in LrC.

Cleaning up your photo collection has never been so easy. With our duplicate search, you can find duplicates within seconds and easily remove them with just a few clicks.

If you use it to organize folders the same thing will happen. You will have to back into LrC and re-establish all the missing links, if you can find them all.

Since LrC is already a powerful DAM why don't you use it. You may or may not be familiar with this site but this book us supposed to be good.

https://www.lightroomqueen.com/members/free-membership/classic-free-ebook/

Good resources here on how to set things up.

https://www.lightroomqueen.com/community/

Jan 01, 2023 at 11:12 AM

gchappel
Offline
• •
Upload & Sell: On

p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · Anyone with experience with Excire Foto?

I tried it about 1-2 yrs ago.
Nope.
I never could even get it to load all my images- large catalog 100,000+
Those that it did load, the AI search was useless.
I stayed with LR- even though I use other programs for processing
gary

Jan 02, 2023 at 01:42 PM

Zenon Char
Offline
• • • • •
Upload & Sell: On

p.1 #5 · p.1 #5 · Anyone with experience with Excire Foto?

Looked further into this product there is an LrC plug-in for the search feature. Not sure what happens when you find a group. If just for searches then what would too do with it? I don’t know if you can edit and how that affects the catalogue.

Jan 07, 2023 at 09:29 AM

dvoss
Offline
•
Upload & Sell: On

p.1 #6 · p.1 #6 · Anyone with experience with Excire Foto?

Excire Foto seems to be a Lightroom replacement with the capability to tag images with their proprietary AI keywording system and create a searchable digital asset manager database.

Excire Search is a Lightroom plug-in to use just the tagging and search functions within Lightroom.

I downloaded the 14-day trial of Excire Search to try out.

https://us.excire.com/shop/excire-test/#excire-search-2022

It was easy to install and creates a separate database of keywords so it doesn't appear to mess with the LR catalog. You have to tell the plug-in to "initialize" your photos, which took about 6 hours for 35K images on a Mac Studio Ultra. This populates the Excire database with keywords based on their AI recognition system (self-contained - no uploading to cloud etc). You can choose later to "transfer" the Excire keywords to the LR database.

I found that simple keyword searches like "car" and "dog" yielded pretty good results, with about 20% false positives (ie, a heating vent grille in my house was tagged "car"...). I don't know about the false negatives yet (failing to tag a car as a car). Still playing with it. I have no idea how this compares with Adobe Sensei (which you cannot use on LR Classic) or Google Vision (cloud based).

Seems an interesting tool, especially if they continually update and improve the AI tagging. Full licensed version is US$99. (I have no connection with the company.)

- David

Edited on Jan 11, 2023 at 12:59 PM · View previous versions

Jan 11, 2023 at 10:25 AM

Zenon Char
Offline
• • • • •
Upload & Sell: On

p.1 #7 · p.1 #7 · Anyone with experience with Excire Foto?

Thanks for the info. Personally I can't see spending $99 for something that already does many of those things. Excire may be more sophisticated but I don't have that need. May work great for others.

Jan 11, 2023 at 10:45 AM

chiron
Offline
• • • •
Upload & Sell: On

p.1 #8 · p.1 #8 · Anyone with experience with Excire Foto?

dvoss wrote:
Excire Foto seems to be a Lightroom replacement with the capability to tag images with their proprietary AI keywording system and create a searchable digital asset manager database.

Excire Search is a Lightroom plug-in to use just the tagging and search functions within Lightroom.

I downloaded the 14-day trial of Excire Search to try out.

https://us.excire.com/shop/excire-test/#excire-search-2022

It was easy to install and creates a separate database of keywords so it doesn't appear to mess with the LR catalog. You have to tell the plug-in to "initialize" your photos, which took about 6 hours for 35K images on a Mac Studio Ultra. This populates the...Show more →

Thanks for the detailed look.

So it sounds like you can try Excire Search out without it doing anything to the Lightroon catalog?

My situation is that I have a lot pf photos that I am going to begin feeding into a new lightroom catalog in an effort to finally get my images organized and culled (rather than existing is a huge ball of string) and I have never attached keywords to any of them.

So a program that would keyword all of my photos in a fairly useful way seems huge. I could then add keywords to the Excire keywords. For example, I could add my dog's actual name to the Excire keyword "dog." I could add different dog's name by searching on photos by year and by keyword "dog."

This seems like it might be very useful.

Any idea how it did sorting different geographical locations, e.g. a trip to Italy vs a trip to Spain?

Jan 12, 2023 at 08:56 AM

Zenon Char
Offline
• • • • •
Upload & Sell: On

p.1 #9 · p.1 #9 · Anyone with experience with Excire Foto?

chiron wrote:
Thanks for the detailed look.

So it sounds like you can try Excire Search out without it doing anything to the Lightroon catalog?

My situation is that I have a lot pf photos that I am going to begin feeding into a new lightroom catalog in an effort to finally get my images organized and culled (rather than existing is a huge ball of string) and I have never attached keywords to any of them.

So a program that would keyword all of my photos in a fairly useful way seems huge. I could then add keywords to the Excire keywords. For example,...Show more →

Just curious about your plan with the new catalogue. Are you planing to import your files into the new catalogue? If so you will lose all your edits.

Perhaps restructuring your existing folder system. Create a new root folder and sub folders. Drag folders from your old structure to the new one. Add keywords, etc as you go. Turn it into a project and do a little every day so you don’t overwhelm yourself.

If I was doing this I might even do it on a separate drive. Not really necessary but it would feel like working with the old and new. May help depending on how much storage you have.

Jan 12, 2023 at 09:49 AM

schlotz
Offline
• • • • •
Upload & Sell: On

p.1 #10 · p.1 #10 · Anyone with experience with Excire Foto?

Seems to me going forward with Excire puts you in a dual path workflow. Even if it's AI was perfect its own database would contain the keywords but LR would not. This sort of process would keep you bouncing back and forth which I suspect would quickly become a royal PITA. Now if Excire would add all of its keywords to the .xmp files of each photo then LR could use them which would make the effort worth while since using the plug-in or app would be a single task up front to get your current LR catalog populated with keywords. Going forward it could then be used as the first step in a workflow, i.e. every time you want to bring a new batch of photos into LR.

Jan 12, 2023 at 10:28 AM

schlotz
Offline
• • • • •
Upload & Sell: On

p.1 #11 · p.1 #11 · Anyone with experience with Excire Foto?

However, if its AI is only 80% accurate as suggested above, I'm not sure that's worth the effort. There could be significant clean up involved, especially if the amount of photos is large.

Jan 12, 2023 at 10:33 AM

dvoss
Offline
•
Upload & Sell: On

p.1 #12 · p.1 #12 · Anyone with experience with Excire Foto?

chiron wrote

So it sounds like you can try Excire Search out without it doing anything to the Lightroon catalog?

Correct. It creates a separate database. You can choose to "transfer" the keywords to LR during initialization or later.

Any idea how it did sorting different geographical locations, e.g. a trip to Italy vs a trip to Spain?

It doesn't do geography and there are holes in what it does do. It will tag "Leaning Tower of Pisa" but not "Eiffel Tower" for instance. One option is search by example. So I guess if you give it a reference picture of the Eiffel Tower it will find the others in your collection. Haven't tried that yet.

Jan 12, 2023 at 10:43 AM

dvoss
Offline
•
Upload & Sell: On

p.1 #13 · p.1 #13 · Anyone with experience with Excire Foto?

schlotz wrote:
Seems to me going forward with Excire puts you in a dual path workflow. Even if it's AI was perfect its own database would contain the keywords but LR would not. This sort of process would keep you bouncing back and forth which I suspect would quickly become a royal PITA. Now if Excire would add all of its keywords to the .xmp files of each photo then LR could use them which would make the effort worth while since using the plug-in or app would be a single task up front to get your current LR catalog populated with...Show more →

I think you're right about the dual workflow. Being lazy and undisciplined, I have a lot of unkeyworded images so I was hoping this will at least get some tagging done.

Good question about xmp - I'm not sure. I think Excire Search just transfers the keywords to your existing LR keywords for each image.

Jan 12, 2023 at 10:49 AM

dvoss
Offline
•
Upload & Sell: On

p.1 #14 · p.1 #14 · Anyone with experience with Excire Foto?

schlotz wrote:
However, if its AI is only 80% accurate as suggested above, I'm not sure that's worth the effort. There could be significant clean up involved, especially if the amount of photos is large.

Right. If I were a professional (I'm not) I'd think twice about using this in a money-making workflow. But if I were a professional, I'd probably be more diligent about tagging right after import into LR. Despite all the hype about AI (ChatGPT anyone?), there's no substitute for putting in the effort to properly organize an image collection.

I'm not bothered by the over-tagging, but if it misses things (false negatives - which I haven't tested) that's a concern.

Jan 12, 2023 at 11:04 AM


FM Forums \| Post-processing & Printing \| Join Upload & Sell