I got to see Excire Foto 2025 in action at The Photography & Video Show 2025. The AI-powered management software is available for Windows and macOS, and is designed to streamline photo – and now video – organization and culling, boosting the software’s suitability for photographers, videographers, and content creators alike.
Excire Foto 2025 can be used as a standalone application or as an Adobe Lightroom Classic plug-in, making it a tantalizing prospect for Adobe users looking to invest in photo organization software.
I got to see a live demo at the Excire stand (D184) at The Photography & Video Show, where the term ‘burrowing owl’ was typed into the software’s search function and, sure enough, it sorted through thousands of images to find photographs of burrowing owls. The system places what the AI deems most relevant first, with broader images coming later, meaning that other species of owl began to creep in further down the list.
A range of new AI-powered tools are available for Excire Foto 2025: AI-assisted culling, a close-up view and easy navigation for rapid assessment of faces, interactive tools for creating collections of people and portrait photos, ultra-fast image display at full resolutions, and video support with an integrated video player.
That’s as well as the usual free-text search, automatic keywording, duplicate-image searches, people and face searches, AI-powered aesthetic ratings, GPS-based search, and the Excire Analytics module.
Undoubtedly the biggest news regarding Excire Foto 2025 is its full video support, with high-quality video playback. But culling is another big addition, something Excire is calling “unparalleled”. The AI culling has the ability to group and sort files in a variety of ways including visual similarity, sharpness, burst sequences, and subject type. The AI can also select the best images using similar criteria.
The AI can search for people and faces, while also taking into consideration criteria such as age, gender, and whether eyes are open or closed, with the ability to tag faces and create automatic people collections. The software automatically applies keywords to every image during import, reducing the need for laborious manual tagging.
Excire says its AI is: “Trained using hundreds of thousands of photos as well as extensive input from expert photographers,” and cannot be trained via the user – a question I asked myself. This is obviously a question many customers have, because Excire answers it on its website, stating: “These methods were trained with millions of photos on specialized hardware.”
The software retails for $199 (around £154 / AU$316), but a limited launch discount of $169 (£131 / AU$268) is available at the time of writing, while Excire Foto 2024 users can take advantage of a $69 (£53 / AU$109) upgrade fee.
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