Finding My Photos

Over the many years I’ve been taking photographs, I’ve tried all sorts of ways to catalogue them so that I can find them again months—or, increasingly, years—later.

I’ve tried descriptive filenames, keywords and albums, but they all demand concentration and effort that I’d rather put into photography.

Adobe Lightroom is promoted as a photo organising and cataloguing application as well as an editing tool. About a year ago, I switched from Lightroom Classic to the cloud-based version, now simply called Lightroom. I wanted its more modern, efficient editing environment, but I was also attracted by its natural-language search.

I can ask it to find photographs of “a green car” or a “churchyard”, and it finds them without my having added those keywords beforehand. For me, though, there’s a limitation: this search only covers the photographs I’ve stored online. As cloud storage costs money, I only upload my finished portfolio images.

My filing system has come under more strain recently as my macro experiments have generated hundreds of photographs. More people are asking whether I have a picture of this or that, and finding the right image is becoming harder.

I’ve been keeping an eye on Excire Foto, a photo management application that uses AI to help cull, catalogue and search local photo archives. Until recently, I’d hesitated because I felt too tied into Adobe’s photography products.

Then I received an article from the Royal Photographic Society announcing its partnership with Excire and a 20% discount on a lifetime licence. That gave me a reason to reconsider.

I’m now considering leaving Lightroom behind and using Excire Foto to manage and search my photographs, Adobe Bridge and Photoshop for my editing workflow, and Nik Efex for black-and-white conversion.

I’ll leave the technical details for another time. What interests me most is the prospect of spending less time searching for photographs and more time making them.