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How Excire Foto finally tamed my massive photo and video archive Photography News editor Adam Duckworth reveals how this AI-powered software turned more than two decades worth of disorganised folders and digital files into a searchable archive
Like many photographers, I’ve spent the decades amassing a huge archive of images. Since moving to digital in 2001 with the Nikon D1X, I’ve held onto every Raw file, JPEG and video clip. I like being able to instantly pull up images for clients, revisit old shoots for reference or simply relive personal moments from years ago. The trouble is, this level of archiving brings with it disorganisation. My library currently stands at a massive 152TB of hard drives, stored in RAID 1 to hold two copies of everything, with a working capacity of
– wading through thousands of frames to isolate the keepers. Excire makes this faster with its AI-assisted culling that groups similar images, highlights the strongest frames and helps me cut out the weak ones earlier so I can get to creative editing faster. Excire Foto isn’t there to wow you with effects or replace your editing suite. Instead, it quietly solves one of the most persistent problems in digital photography: keeping sprawling archives accessible. It turns your photo library into an asset rather than an obstacle. That archive I once dreaded searching in is now far more usable. I can pull up images from 2005 as easily as last week’s shoot. I’ve cleared out duplicates, rediscovered forgotten gems and shaved hours off my workflow. For the first time in years, I feel truly in control of my images, rather than the other way round.
76TB. I keep two separate off-site backups for safety too. My files are stored in folders labelled only with dates, locations or events, so finding a particular image meant trying to remember when it was taken and under what circumstances. It’s a hopeless task when you’ve been shooting for so long. So when I came across Excire Foto, a standalone AI-powered photo organisation tool, I knew that seeing if it could turn my mountainous archive into something usable would be the perfect torture test. And since it works with video files too, it’s an all-in-one solution. Downloading the software and getting it running was simple, and there are clear instructions on exactly what to do. The first thing that impressed me was the AI keywording. Like many, I sometimes have the discipline to tag images manually, but when you’re shooting thousands of frames a week, it’s easy to let that habit slip. Excire does all that for you. It scans each image and automatically assigns descriptive keywords: objects, colours, scenes, people. Suddenly, shots I’d long forgotten were instantly categorised, ready to be rediscovered with a simple search.
Of course, importing such a vast library takes a long time, so I left Excire running overnight to ingest and analyse folders. Once that’s done, the search function really works. Instead of trawling through folders, I can type a phrase in natural language and Excire understands it. If I want a ‘red sports car on a track’ or ‘bride holding bouquet,’ it finds exactly that. Excire also solved another headache – duplicates and near-duplicates. Like many pros, I often shoot in bursts, bracketing exposures or firing off multiple frames, which results in folders full of almost identical shots. Excire automatically groups these so I can compare them side by side and decide which to keep. It even flags duplicate files across different drives, reclaiming space I didn’t realise I’d wasted. A standout feature for me is its people organisation. Excire doesn’t just do facial recognition, but allows people-specific searches based on facial attributes. This helps to quickly locate all images of a particular client, family member or model, so requests for ‘all shots of me’ are a five- minute task instead of a day-long hunt. Culling has always been one of the most soul-destroying parts of photography
DRIVING ME MAD These HDD units were sorted right out by Excire Foto software
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