Your approach to tagging photos

[Bebop]

So in practical terms, how do you find the plus version useful? I've read the differences on their site but without using the software the benefits are not clear.

Surely software that handles tagging is only writing to the metadata and not re-encoding the picture data?

I would hope that was the case.

I could be wrong, because mostly my files are raw files, but for jpegs it doesn't save an xmp file, it updates the jpeg, and each time you save a jpeg because it's lossy, you lose a little bit of data. It might be the way I've set it up. I think Jpegs do get smaller when I sync my backups and I probably will have been adding keywords, so adding rather than removing data.

I couldn't appreciate the differences between the versions, so I trialled and bought Photo Mechanic before trying the Plus. The Plus Version is way more useful as I think @myotis has said. It is a proper DAM - it isn't as easy to use as Lightroom for searches, though as I say, it allows me to search as many catalogs at once as I like and the hard drives don't have to be connected. I'm usually just searching on keywords. You can get quite sophisticated, but I have to get my crib notes out to remind me how to do some things. You can also browse even though the hard drives are not connected.

I found it really useful when I was doing football photography where I could upload the team lists and numbers before the match with a code replacement file and then quickly add tags and captions with minimal typing - like look up tables - one character might fill out their name. It would save me valuable time. You could use this for say bird species, type bf and it fills in bullfinch for example. You'd just need a code replacement file for each type of photography you were doing.

It's really quick to cull and rate photos when time is tight. I found the support really helpful and they did implement one of my suggestions in one of their updates which I was really chuffed about as it's something I use frequently.

One downside of Photo Mechanic Plus for me is that it uses the embedded jpeg in the raw file for the preview. This is fine for my Canon files, but it seems OM embed a jpeg that is not full size, so my previews are not full size. The other thing is that I think it is not so easy to use as Lightroom for example. Some things are less intuitive, but an awful lot is possible.

 

[Musicman]

You can do that using Smart Collections.

Yes, that is true, although I would prefer not to keep cluttering up my Smart Collections with a lot of ad hoc queries.

 

[Eucris]

Yes, that is true, although I would prefer not to keep cluttering up my Smart Collections with a lot of ad hoc queries.

Well you can delete it once it has served its purpose. Or you could just change the parameters to use it for a different enquiry.

 

[myotis]

Yes, that is true, although I would prefer not to keep cluttering up my Smart Collections with a lot of ad hoc queries.

As I suggested in my earlier post, you can just recycle the same smart folder to run the "NOT" query, I have the "NOT" smart folder in a folder group that has admin type operations .e.g a metadata conflict smart folder and a missing keywords smart folder.

 

[Magician9107]

How useful do you find Excire and what sort of subjects are you keywording?

I bought Excire 2023, and upgraded to 2024, but haven't upgraded to 2025, The review I watched on the 2025 version suggested there had been no real improvements in the keywording with this latest version

For my use, landscape and wildlife, I found the keywording useless, Nearly every landscape was simply identified as "Nature*" regardless of whether it was a mountain or a river. I seem to member it occasionally identfied something as "water". Many were only identified as "low contrast*". Images of frame filling birds or butterflies only received a keyword of "color*".

* I can't actually remember the exact keywords, but they were something like this.

It was very fast, and good at metadata searches, but the AI keywording was very disappointing.

As I suggested in my first sentence, I wonder if it works better with different subject matter. Have you found any keywordng improvements with 2025?

Too be honest I took Excire 2024 off my computer because as you say, it was not as good as I was expecting. I am very lazy at tagging my photos and I have so many now of all sorts of subjects, so when I was offered an upgrade for just £69, I took them up on it. I am in the process of running my photo hard drives through the program, I am hoping the AI will have improved but I guess like a lot of AI processes, it will improve over time. At least it gives me a head start with my tagging and the all the search settings seem to work very well.

 

[myotis]

Too be honest I took Excire 2024 off my computer because as you say, it was not as good as I was expecting. I am very lazy at tagging my photos and I have so many now of all sorts of subjects, so when I was offered an upgrade for just £69, I took them up on it. I am in the process of running my photo hard drives through the program, I am hoping the AI will have improved but I guess like a lot of AI processes, it will improve over time. At least it gives me a head start with my tagging and the all the search settings seem to work very well.

I hope it has, but the reviews of Excire 2025 (in terms of AI keywording) haven't been all that promising.

Once you have run your files through through the program, it would be useful to know how you got on.

 

[ChrisR]

I was doing a little keywording yesterday morning with Capture One Pro. Normally this is fine; if there is a group of images that all need the same keyword, select them, enter the keyword and bingo! But yesterday it just wouldn't work. Oh dear, something wrong with my catalogue, I thought. So I did a verify (a few errors found) and repair... but the problem still occurred. A bit of RTFMing, and I found a few more ways to try to "fix" my "broken" catalogue, to no avail.

A few hours later, after wasting half the day, I did some rather smarter RTFMing, during which I realised I had the previous night unticked the "Edit all variants" box. Tick. Keyword. Works just fine, the way it should!

 

[myotis]

I was doing a little keywording yesterday morning with Capture One Pro. Normally this is fine; if there is a group of images that all need the same keyword, select them, enter the keyword and bingo! But yesterday it just wouldn't work. Oh dear, something wrong with my catalogue, I thought. So I did a verify (a few errors found) and repair... but the problem still occurred. A bit of RTFMing, and I found a few more ways to try to "fix" my "broken" catalogue, to no avail.

A few hours later, after wasting half the day, I did some rather smarter RTFMing, during which I realised I had the previous night unticked the "Edit all variants" box. Tick. Keyword. Works just fine, the way it should!

A blessing and a curse that edit all variants option.

I keep it off by default (dark icon) because generally that is the least damaging (ie avoiding deleting all selected variants by mistake) and consciously turn it on (orange icon) when I want to edit multiple variants at once.