If you’re like me, then you love using photo prompts to inspire beautiful photos of your clients. And if you’re also like me, you love a quick way to spark ideas! Let’s check out how Excire Foto can be used with your own library of photos as an idea generation tool.
Excire Foto is an AI engine which automatically sorts your images according to content and the photography style detected in the image. It’s a powerful, fast piece of software that requires zero human input to tag images with keywords for quick searching.
There are so many ways that Excire Foto can be used. From culling photos based on expressions (it has the power to filter photos based on whether people are smiling or not, looking at the camera or not, and more), to searching your back catalog of photos to use in new projects, the applications are endless.
I write about photo prompts on my blog, the Promptographer Guide, and I loaded my library of inspiration images into Excire Foto to use its AI engine to quickly generate a mood board for clients using my own images.
How long does it take Excire Foto to process photos?
My photo prompt idea library currently contains 268 photos, and it took Excire Foto under a minute and a half to process and automatically keyword my images.
That’s pretty quick! I am not one of those amazing, meticulous people who keywords every image they edit (you glorious gods, you) so Excire Foto is something of a game-changer for me in this regard.
Create a mood board using the hierarchy in Excire Foto to browse by content
The main fun of Excire Foto happens in the right-hand sidebar, where the keyword hierarchy shows how many photos have been tagged with each keyword.
I’m shooting a wedding in a few days’ time, so let’s check out what ideas I already have in my back catalog of photos.
The hierarchy is divided into Content and Photography. Content keywords use AI to detect what the photo contains, whereas Photography detects the photographic qualities of the images.
I can jump into Event then Wedding and it brings up 21 photos in my catalog that Excire Foto has tagged Wedding. I can narrow that down to the Bridal Couple keyword, or just the Bride keyword.
By selecting and right-clicking I can add all my favorites to a custom Collection. I’ll use these to create a mood board for the job that I can share with my clients (more on sharing later).
Under the keyword Other, then Romantic, there’s a heap of great photo inspiration to save for my mood board.
There is so much power in this Content hierarchy. Why not check out Person, Age, Baby / Toddler next time you have a family photoshoot scheduled? You could create a mood board for specific clients or events, or by type of session, all drawing on your own photos as inspiration.
Browsing photos using the Photography keywords in Excire Foto
The Photography half of the keyword hierarchy is another great source for inspiration.
Low-key is extremely popular at the moment, so checking out my photos tagged Dark I can find heaps of great inspiration for after dark at the wedding reception.
Another favorite of mine is the silhouette, so more of those go into my mood board collection. Remember, right-click and add to your custom collection to save those images for later use.
The final step to create a mood board: Sharing images in Excire Foto
Now that I have grabbed some inspiration for my wedding clients, I can bring up all my collected images by clicking the collection name. I want to share these with my clients as a mood board, and this is easily done with Excire Foto.
The first time you share, you’ll need to set up sharing in the Preferences menu. Hit File, then Preference, then Sharing, and follow the prompts to connect your Dropbox or Google Drive account. You only need to do this once.
Right-click the collection and select Share, then wait for the photos to upload.
Once done, I have a link ready to share with my clients, and our mood board is ready to go in my Google Drive.
Depending on your process, you could have clients add their own must-haves to the folder, or use it as a planning tool at your pre-wedding meeting.
Excire Foto makes it easy to trawl your own photos for inspiration
I love how easily I can make a mood board out of my own photos using Excire Foto. All with no time-consuming effort on my part. Win-win!
