I waste a lot of time looking for specific photos, so I am interested in Excire Foto 2025 and Excire Search 2026. Has anyone used them, and are they useful and effective?
Also, does Excire Search 2026, which is the Lightroom Classic plug-in version, have all the features and functionality of Excire Foto 2025?
I have used excire foto for a year or two.
I have a HUGE library- close to a million images over the last 20yrs. Yes, I need to cull more.
Do I use it everyday? Nope
But- if I have an individual image or group of images to find- it works great.
Just as an example. A friend passed away, and the family asked for an additional copy of a family portrait I had done years ago. We did not remember when or anything. All they had was a 4x6" image in a frame. It would have been looking for a needle in a haystack. I typed 5people white background into excire. The result was a couple hundred images, and I narrowed down to the correct image in less than 2 minutes. I have dozens of similiar success stories. It is not perfect- it does not usually get me to the single image I need-- but it is close enough. A couple dozen to a hundred images show up, and its a quick scroll to find the specific one.
I also like it's catalog contains images that are offline. I keep a lot of older works on external backup drives which are offline until needed.
So for looking for an individual image or group of images it works great.
Hope that helps
gary
gchappel wrote:
I have used excire foto for a year or two.
I have a HUGE library- close to a million images over the last 20yrs. Yes, I need to cull more.
Do I use it everyday? Nope
But- if I have an individual image or group of images to find- it works great.
Just as an example. A friend passed away, and the family asked for an additional copy of a family portrait I had done years ago. We did not remember when or anything. All they had was a 4x6" image in a frame. It would have been looking for a needle in a haystack. I typed 5people white background into excire. The result was a couple hundred images, and I narrowed down to the correct image in less than 2 minutes. I have dozens of similiar success stories. It is not perfect- it does not usually get me to the single image I need-- but it is close enough. A couple dozen to a hundred images show up, and its a quick scroll to find the specific one.
I also like it's catalog contains images that are offline. I keep a lot of older works on external backup drives which are offline until needed.
So for looking for an individual image or group of images it works great.
Hope that helps
gary ...Show more →
Thanks, Gary, what you wrote is very helpful. It actually sounds like just what I need and sort of amazing. My photographs are spread out over many folders on three computers (two laptops and a desktop), many of which have been improrted into Lightroom Classic but many of which have not been imported. Some files also sit on SSD portable drives. It is chaos!
I take it from what you say about using Excire with your backup drives that Excire can be directed to search specific drives and locations? So, I could do multiple searches for an image of, for example, "mountains in snow" on various computers and drives? Can you then move or copy some of the images that you find to a new folder? How many computers can the program be installed on?
Since I have a lot of photos in LRC but also a lot that are not, I assume that I would need both Excire Foto and Excire Search? They offer a substantial discount if you buy both programs together.
Images of coarse need to be imported into the excire database. With external drives it was easy- just imported from each drive. Then I can unmount the drive and excire has logged the image and the location.
Yes, it can search individual drives, but I have never used it for that.
I just search "mountains in snow" across my entire catalog. You can of coarse save the results as a collection.
I have not loaded it onto more than one computer- so can't help there. I think you can load it on up to 3.
Drop support a line. I had a couple questions as I was setting things up and they responded quickly.
Excire can also rank by its evaluation of aesthetics. I found that interesting. I ranked my entire catalog. Of it's highest 100, I had printed almost all of them. So they were all images I liked.
The bottom 25%, they were all pretty bad. One of these days I am just going to delete the entire bottom of this list- save space and I will not miss a thing.
gary
gchappel wrote:
Images of coarse need to be imported into the excire database. With external drives it was easy- just imported from each drive. Then I can unmount the drive and excire has logged the image and the location.
Yes, it can search individual drives, but I have never used it for that.
I just search "mountains in snow" across my entire catalog. You can of coarse save the results as a collection.
I have not loaded it onto more than one computer- so can't help there. I think you can load it on up to 3.
Drop support a line. I had a couple questions as I was setting things up and they responded quickly.
Excire can also rank by its evaluation of aesthetics. I found that interesting. I ranked my entire catalog. Of it's highest 100, I had printed almost all of them. So they were all images I liked.
The bottom 25%, they were all pretty bad. One of these days I am just going to delete the entire bottom of this list- save space and I will not miss a thing.
gary ...Show more →
Ah, I see--it creates its own database which then is independent of what drives are connected. Very handy.
It is also interesting that the aestheics function did a reasonably good job.
I too use Excire. My entire collection lives on an external drive, organized the way I like it. Very easy to point Excire to the desired folders/subfolders. Then analyze the photos for duplicates, out of focus, similarities etc. It will also add keywords. The rejects are automatically ide9ntified, and I delete them (or keep if you want to). And I can star them if need be.
At this point, my photos are nicely organized, and I open Photolab9 and point to the same directory. So Photolab and Excire can both access the same photos (with the same XML files, so if you rate a photo in Excire it will show in Photolab and vice-versa. From here on the post processing is carried on in Photolab9/Filmpack8/ViewPoint and printed on QImage1. I will add that I have just moved to PL less than 3 months ago after using Capture One for a long time, and LR before that.
Here's a question, does Excire write any keywords or descriptions to the metadata of the image, so say if you load the images into a SmugMug database, will the info that Excire uses stay with the image file?
cortlander wrote:
I too use Excire. My entire collection lives on an external drive, organized the way I like it. Very easy to point Excire to the desired folders/subfolders. Then analyze the photos for duplicates, out of focus, similarities etc. It will also add keywords. The rejects are automatically ide9ntified, and I delete them (or keep if you want to). And I can star them if need be.
At this point, my photos are nicely organized, and I open Photolab9 and point to the same directory. So Photolab and Excire can both access the same photos (with the same XML files, so if you rate a photo in Excire it will show in Photolab and vice-versa. From here on the post processing is carried on in Photolab9/Filmpack8/ViewPoint and printed on QImage1. I will add that I have just moved to PL less than 3 months ago after using Capture One for a long time, and LR before that....Show more →
This sounds very good and is a strong recommendation.
What if I want to use Lightroom Classic to post-process files? The only way I know of to do that is to first move all my files into LRC and use the LRC plug-in version of Excire. I probably should have all my files in LRC anyway since I prefer that system for post-processing.
But I am thinking of getting both the LRC and the free-standing versions of Exxcire. They give a large discount on the second version, and then I could use Excire with both my files that are in LRC and my files that are not.
petersm59 wrote:
Here's a question, does Excire write any keywords or descriptions to the metadata of the image, so say if you load the images into a SmugMug database, will the info that Excire uses stay with the image file?
From what others have written, it does write keywords that can be ready by Adobe or DXO programs and presumably by others. But I have no idea about SmugMug.
chiron wrote:
From what others have written, it does write keywords that can be ready by Adobe or DXO programs and presumably by others. But I have no idea about SmugMug.
It has been a while since I used SmugMug, so I do not remember. But here is detailed information on how Excire handles keywords:
chiron wrote:
This sounds very good and is a strong recommendation.
What if I want to use Lightroom Classic to post-process files? The only way I know of to do that is to first move all my files into LRC and use the LRC plug-in version of Excire. I probably should have all my files in LRC anyway since I prefer that system for post-processing.
But I am thinking of getting both the LRC and the free-standing versions of Exxcire. They give a large discount on the second version, and then I could use Excire with both my files that are in LRC and my files that are not. ...Show more →
