Here at Photofocus, we’re big fans of products that solve everyday problems. A lot of us have used Excire Search, the plugin for Lightroom Classic that helps you intelligently search through your catalog. But for those of us who don’t regularly use Lightroom Classic, we were disappointed to not have anything similar.

Until now.

Last week, Excire announced its newest product — Excire Foto — a standalone application that has the same feature set as the Excire Search plugin. It lets you add in folders of images that it analyzes, allowing you to sift through and search through things like keywords, faces and more.

The software has already been released in Europe, and we’re looking forward to a U.S. launch on July 4, 2020.

I got an early look at the software, so check out my quick look below.

Search options

Keyword search

When I use Excire Search, keyword search is undoubtedly the feature I use the most. This lets you enter in a specific word to search by, or you can select from a predetermined list. The great thing here is that you’re not limited to just one keyword — you can use as many as you’d like. So I can search for “meat” in my food photographs, but I can also add a keyword of “dish” to signify photos that have a plate visible.

Find faces

This is helpful if you’re looking to find people photos throughout your library of photos. You can filter your photos by number of faces present in a photo, as well as the age. It even lets you filter by male or female, or whether your subjects have a smile or not.

Find similar photos

Let’s say you just got finished with a photoshoot, and have some shots that you know are similar to what you’ve taken in the past. It’s easy to find similar photos in Excire Foto. For instance, in this example, I was able to find photos taken at the ocean with birds in them.

Find people

For me, being able to find people based on AI is extremely powerful. With the find people search in Excire Foto, you can select a reference photo and then select the person’s face. You can filter down further by selecting whether or not they have a smile, if their eyes are open or closed and more.

Organizational tools

What sets Excire Foto apart from its plugin counterpart is the ability to organize right within the program. You can create collections and groups of images, making it easy to go back and find results later. You can also see recent results from each search function.

Excire Foto also works with your third-party editing platform, letting you filter by things like ratings (if your editor supports sidecar XMP files).

All in all, I’m pretty excited about what Excire Foto will do for me, especially as work begins to come back following the COVID-19 pandemic. Be sure to stay tuned for complete coverage once Excire Foto is released in July.

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