A few weeks ago, I received a beta version of Excire Foto and was excited to discover its capabilities. Below, I’ll run through the easy setup process and show you how to analyze your photos in the program.
Installation was simple on my Mac, following the standard DMG installation process. When the program is opened, note the options on the left side of the screen. To begin, you’ll need to get your photos into the program. If you click the Add button under the Folders area, you can add an entire directory of photos for Excire to register and analyze.
Once you pick a folder to load, you’ll come to a screen with several options. You could choose to simply load your photo folders and analyze later. But in my case, I added a directory with about 10,000 vacation photos and selected the option to analyze the photos and load any keywords. Excire then undertakes a several step process.
The early steps are quick. The last two steps are registering — which in my case took under 10 minutes — and then analyzing. This final step took around 45 minutes, but as you’ll soon see, this is where the magic happens.
Once uploaded, if you scroll down on the folder you added, you’ll see any subfolders that existed. Excire shows your exact folder structure.
Intelligently analyzing your photos
Once in the folder you want, you’ll see the pictures from the folder populate the middle area of the software. Scroll to find a specific photo and click on it. On the right side of the screen, there is a histogram of the photo. But more importantly, there are keywords. This is what the software deciphered when it analyzed your photos.
I am truly impressed by what Excire recognizes in my photos. Translating this to searchable keywords is a true time saver. As an example, let’s look at the keywords generated by Excire for this photo: Architecture, ruin, person face, two faces, frontal face, adult, eyes open, male, female and smile.
You can immediately see how this keyword generation will help you easily search through your personal, professional, or stock photo library to find groups of images to suit your needs.
After clicking through a few photos, I noticed that the keyword analysis was accurate the majority of the time. When it comes to categorizing the content of your photos, it is excellent at recognizing types of animals, architecture, texture, nature, vehicles and more. It tagged an interior church photo with church, religion, organ and architecture. It tagged a photo of a cow with cow, animal, herbivore, farm animal and agriculture. That’s pretty good if you ask me.
And yes, it tags food and dishes for all you food photographers out there.
Excire also tags photo qualities, such as aerial shot, symmetry, silhouette, high contrast, desaturated, dark, bright, sepia tones, etc. You can add more available keywords or your own keywords, and also delete keywords as needed.
Underneath the keywords area is the keyword hierarchy. This shows all the keyword content buckets that were created from your photo collection. Beneath this is a thorough listing of all the metadata for the selected photo.
Enjoy the efficiency of searching your photo collection with Excire Foto, and look for more articles on other features of this new program.
