Do you ever get tired of manually searching for, tagging, culling, and organizing your images? I can relate.
For me, managing photos has always been a slog. Keywording, sorting, and culling are essential, I know, but image-organization tasks require time and energy that I just don’t have, especially since I’d rather spend my limited free hours taking photos instead of sitting in front of my computer, tediously applying keywords to my files.
I spent years trying to stay on top of my ever-growing image collection, but I was never truly organized, and I certainly never felt in control. This resulted in three huge problems:
- I couldn’t find specific photos when I needed them. I’d waste a whole lot of time scrolling through my Lightroom catalog, often with nothing to show for it, which was maddening.
- I wasn’t able to share my best photos publicly. Image organization and culling took too long, so I often gave up halfway through or skipped whole folders; as a result, I was constantly missing the opportunity to review, edit, and share images that deserved to be seen.
- Each new photoshoot felt less valuable. I knew that most of my photos would end up buried in the proverbial pile, so I started to question the value of taking new photos in the first place. This led to dwindling motivation on my part. It also caused my photography skills to stagnate; since I wasn’t regularly reviewing my new images, I wasn’t able to learn from my mistakes, and I wasn’t able to grow as a photographer.
Then I discovered Excire, and everything changed.
You see, Excire’s AI-powered photo organizer obliterates traditional workflow bottlenecks so that I can spend less time managing my files and more time doing what I love. It’s helped me (finally) get my image catalog under control, and I can now find individual files in just a couple of seconds (largely thanks to the prompt-search feature, which I discuss below!).
Over the past few years, Excire has been steadily growing in popularity, but a lot of folks are still unfamiliar with the software. So in this article, I’d like to share five reasons why Excire is an image-management tool that every photographer should try.
Let’s dive right in!
Out of Excire’s many AI-powered tools, Find By Text Prompt is probably my favorite. Not only is it ridiculously good at retrieving specific images hidden deep in your catalog, but it’s a fun way to explore your existing images and discover photos that you didn’t realize existed.
And the feature is so easy to use. You open the prompt-search dialog box:
Then you type a quick description of the image (or images) that you’re looking for:
And Excire almost instantly returns the corresponding images from your catalog.
This requires zero manual work on your part. During the initialization stage—when you first add your images to Excire—the program’s AI analyzes each file. Then, when you input a prompt, the AI retrieves the images that most closely match your query.
I want to emphasize that the prompt-search tool has essentially no learning curve. You just describe the files you’re looking for in your own words, and Excire finds them, no matter where they’re located in your catalog.
And prompt search doesn’t only understand concrete descriptions such as “beach at sunset” or “golden retriever by a tree.” It also understands abstract terms such as “love,” “happiness,” and “tranquility”—so you can formulate complex queries to find the perfect photos for sharing on social media, for adding to your website, for printing, and more.
That said, Excire’s Find By Text Prompt tool does have a couple of limitations. First, it can’t find photos that don’t exist in your catalog. (If you search for “the Eiffel Tower at night” but you’ve never taken a photograph in Paris, the results will be disappointing!)
Second, the prompt-search tool doesn’t recognize specific faces. If you’re looking for a photo of your brother, Brad, you can describe what he looks like, and Excire will search your catalog for the corresponding picture—but you can’t type “Brad” and expect Excire to know who that is.
Fortunately, the software includes another set of features that are perfect for finding (and managing) photos containing people, as I discuss in the next section:
2. Excire’s Facial-Recognition Features Make It Easy to Organize Your People & Portrait Photos
Managing your photos of family, friends, and/or clients can be tough, especially if you’re always adding to your collection. Grouping together photos containing the same person, manually applying name tags, and scrolling through vacation albums looking for images showing specific relatives—it’s frustrating, it’s time-consuming, and with Excire, it’s a thing of the past.
Excire’s photo-management software offers two different tools for finding images of people in your image collection: Find Faces and Find People.
The Find Faces tool lets you search your catalog for photos based on the number of faces, the ages of the subjects, the genders of the subjects, and whether the subjects are smiling:
Whereas the Find People tool lets you find all the images of a specific person in your catalog based on a reference photo:
In other words, as long as you have a single reference image, you can use Find People to look for all the other images in your catalog that contain the same person—which makes it easy to create people-based collections on the fly.
And to make it even easier, the latest version of Excire—Excire Foto 2025—includes new features for managing people and portrait photos. You can apply name tags to faces, and Excire automatically creates corresponding People collections, which continue to populate as you tag additional faces:
Plus, you have the option to zoom in on faces in thumbnails and full-sized images for easier identification. And Excire indicates the sharpness of each face via different color labels:
Taken separately, each of these tools are great for accessing and organizing photos of people in your catalog. But taken together, they allow you to rapidly find, evaluate, and group thousands of images, which can help pretty much any photographer, from the casual shooter to the portrait professional, save a ton of time.
And speaking of time-saving tools:
3. Excire’s Culling Module Helps You Select Your Best Shots in Seconds
While I love photography, I do not love culling. Looking at similar photos, one after another, just takes up too much time, and after a few hundred shots, I feel aesthetically desensitized—where every photo feels equally good (or bad), and I can no longer make effective culling decisions.
My guess is that other photographers feel the same way, or at least somewhat similarly. (And if you do, in fact, enjoy a lengthy photoshoot cull, I would love to hear your reasons in the comments!)
But I’m happy to share that Excire Foto 2025 includes a brand-new culling module, which uses AI to help you go through batches of images at a breakneck pace. In essence, you tell Excire to analyze a batch of images; it then analyzes the photos and groups them according to different properties (visual similarity, content, specific people, sequences/bursts, etc.), which you can configure to suit your workflow.
From there, you can access the groups that fit your requirements, and you can sort photos within groups by a variety of useful characteristics: aesthetics, face sharpness, eye sharpness, whether the subjects have their eyes open, whether the subjects are smiling, and more.
Used like this, Excire becomes a flexible culling assistant. Instead of spending time manually reviewing lots of similar photos, you can use Excire to group and sort the images as needed. Then you can easily apply flags to your favorites, which automatically appear in the Selection bin.
If you want to save even more time when culling, you can actually instruct Excire to automatically select photos from the get-go. The software includes a built-in smart selection option, which lets you input your selection criteria and then uses AI to choose the best images from the batch.
Whether you prefer to use Excire’s culling tools as an assistant or as your primary means of selecting photos is really up to you. It depends on your preferences—but what’s especially great about Excire’s culling module is that it’s flexible. You can start out using the software as a culling assistant and then transition into a more AI-heavy workflow over time. Or you can change your workflow depending on the type of shoot that you’re culling, where you rely on Excire’s smart selection for your more casual images and spend a bit more time on manual selection for clients. At the end of the day, you’re in control, and you have the freedom to use Excire’s tools to suit your requirements. For me, that’s AI image management at its absolute best.
4. Excire Runs Locally on Your Computer to Ensure Complete Privacy
With all this talk of AI, you might be (understandably) worried about privacy. After all, some AI-based photography software does indeed upload user files to the cloud, leaving you vulnerable to misuse of data and privacy breaches.
Fortunately, with Excire, that’s not a concern. Excire’s AI models are developed in-house and run locally on the user’s computer. As a result, none of your data is ever given to a third party or even accessed by external servers, and your images remain safe and sound on your personal hard drives.
Now, if you do want to connect your Excire catalog to the cloud, that is also an option. The standalone software offers Google Drive and Dropbox integration, which makes it easy to share photos over the internet. (Excire is also fully compatible with NAS systems.)
These integrations can certainly come in handy when managing your photos, but I want to emphasize: Excire’s overarching emphasis is on user privacy. When you use Excire software, you can be confident that your files are secure.
5. Excire Integrates Nicely Into Existing Workflows
If you already have some type of image-management workflow in place, don’t worry: Excire won’t force you to start over. Once again, Excire software is designed to be flexible, so you can integrate its AI-powered toolkit into your existing workflow as needed.
How is this possible? Excire is offered in two different forms: as a standalone program, Excire Foto 2025, and a Lightroom Classic plugin, Excire Search 2024.
Excire Foto 2025 is a full-fledged image-management program that offers both Excire’s innovative AI tools as well as standard photo-organization features (e.g., image ratings, metadata filtering, collections, etc.).
Excire Search 2024, on the other hand, is a plugin that brings Excire’s tools right into the Lightroom Classic interface—so that users can manage their Lightroom catalog with the help of Excire’s AI.
If you’re very invested in a Lightroom-based workflow, then Excire Search 2024 is likely the way to go. It includes most of the same features as Excire Foto 2025 (though a few of the latest features in the standalone program, such as AI-powered culling and face-tagging, have not yet been added to the plugin).
If you don’t have an all-in-one photo manager, or you spend most of your time working with software such as Luminar, Capture One, or Photoshop, then Excire Foto 2025 is the better choice. It can be used side by side with any of these programs—so that you’re able to search for and organize photos with Excire, then open the relevant files for editing and/or printing in your software of choice.
Go Test Out Excire’s Photo-Management Software for Yourself!
I’ve shared several of Excire’s most powerful features, but there’s still plenty that I left out: AI keywording, intelligent aesthetic scores, GPS search, the duplicate finder, and more. These are tools that can be used separately or in conjunction with one another to ensure that your precious images are always at your fingertips and that you’re always in control of your catalog.
And you can try them out for yourself! You can download a free 14-day trial of Excire Foto 2025 or Excire Search 2024. That way, you know what you’re getting, and you can see exactly how Excire’s tools can enhance your workflow.
Thanks to the innovative features included in Excire’s image-management programs, you can finally stay on top of your image organization and culling, and you can actually enjoy the process of going through your image catalog. You can appreciate (and learn from!) your best files, and you can dedicate far more time to your photographic passion.
So head over to the Excire website and download your free trial—or dive in headfirst with a lifetime license for Excire Foto 2025 or Excire Search 2024!
