The Best AI Lightroom Plugin: 5 Ways Excire Search Will Instantly Improve Your Lightroom Classic Experience
Lightroom Classic can be a powerful tool for photographers—I myself use it extensively!—but when it comes to organizing large catalogs, it can also be slow, tedious, and downright frustrating. As your catalog grows, you’re faced with thousands of photos scattered across folders and Collections. And finding a specific image, especially if it isn’t carefully keyworded, can mean spending minutes or even hours scrolling through old files.
Excire Search 2024 is a Lightroom Classic plugin that addresses these problems head-on. It offers a set of AI-powered tools for searching, filtering, culling, and organizing your images, and it brings them directly into the Lightroom interface. I use Excire’s plugin all the time in my own photo-management workflow, and once you download the software for yourself, I suspect that you will, too.
In the sections below, I’ll share five key ways Excire Search can immediately improve your Lightroom Classic experience. And by the time you’re finished reading, you’ll understand why I find it so effective; from lightning-fast prompt search to cutting-edge facial recognition, I really do believe that it’s the best AI Lightroom plugin on the market.
Let’s dive right in!
1. You Can Instantly Find Any Image With Free-Text Descriptions
For me, Excire Search’s most transformative feature is the Search by Text Prompt tool (which I often refer to as “prompt-search AI”). It lets you locate images in your Lightroom Classic catalog simply by describing them in plain language.
For instance, you could type “silhouette of a person on the beach” or “long-exposure light trails and city skyline,” and Excire will sift through your catalog, find the corresponding photos, and display them in Lightroom—often in less than a second.
What sets this apart is that it’s independent of any keywording. To use prompt search, you don’t need to tag your images in advance; Excire analyzes the actual content of the photo (i.e., what’s visually in the frame) so it can return relevant results, even if your catalog is completely untagged.
I often find that the Search by Text Prompt tool is actually better for searching through my image library than any type of metadata search, no matter the keywords that I’ve added previously. This is because Excire’s AI picks up on image characteristics that I (and most photographers) wouldn’t think to add as keywords: emotions, abstract concepts, image styles, little details, and more.
One more benefit of prompt search: It can help you rediscover older photos you may have forgotten about. Since each search is practically instant, you can easily spend a few minutes trying various prompts just to see what Excire can surface. With every search, I tend to find at least a couple of solid images I didn’t know existed, which is a fantastic feeling.
Compared to Lightroom’s built-in search—which depends entirely on metadata and manually entered keywords—Excire’s prompt-search approach is faster, more intuitive, and far less limiting. You don’t have to remember what you named a file or how you keyworded a shoot five years ago. You just describe what you’re looking for, and Excire’s plugin does the rest!
(Of course, you can only find images that already exist in your Lightroom Catalog; if you search for “the Eiffel tower at night” but have never taken an Eiffel tower photograph, Excire will come up short.)
2. You Can Curate Your Image Collections With Similarity Search
Another standout feature in Excire Search 2024 is Search by Example Photo, or similarity search. The concept is simple: you select an image—either from your Lightroom catalog or from an external source—and Excire will scan your photo library for similar photos.
You can choose whether to base the results on content (what’s in the frame) or color (the overall tone and palette):
At first glance, this may seem like a niche tool, but I’ve found it to be surprisingly powerful. The most straightforward use-case is to locate specific images—like a visual version of the prompt search. For instance, if you choose a photo of a black SUV as your initial reference image, Excire will find other images in your catalog that feature similar vehicles. This alone can save time if you’re pulling together related images for a project or client.
But where similarity search really shines, at least for me, is in curating cohesive image sets. I often use it to build collections of photos for website portfolios, blog posts, print collections, and Instagram carousels. I’ll start with a single image that establishes a particular visual or conceptual theme, then I’ll run a similarity search. From there, I scroll through the results, looking for images that match the tone and subject matter without feeling repetitive.
The first few results are often a little too similar to group together for my purposes, but later results are just right: similar enough that they complement one another, but not so similar that they’re redundant. And by running a few similarity searches using different reference images, I can quickly build a set of visually and thematically consistent photos that still feel varied and interesting.
Lightroom Classic doesn’t offer anything comparable to this, so having Excire Search installed really does take Lightroom to the next level as a photo-management program.
3. You Can Search With Powerful Facial Recognition Tools
Excire Search 2024 includes two separate facial-recognition features that make finding and organizing images of people so much easier: Search for Faces and Search for People.
Search for Faces is a filtering tool that lets you narrow down your catalog based on facial characteristics. You can search for photos based on the number of subjects, the facial expression, the subject age, and more. It’s especially useful if you’re trying to find specific types of images, like group photos, headshots, and couple portraits.
Search for People, on the other hand, is designed to help you locate specific individuals. You start by selecting a reference photo that includes the person you’re looking for:
Excire then scans your Lightroom catalog and finds other images of the same person, even if the photos were taken in different lighting, from different angles, or at different times.
For portrait, wedding, and event photographers, this tool is a huge timesaver. If a client asks for more images of the bride and a particular family member, you can run a quick search and pull up the relevant images in seconds. You can also use it to apply nametags efficiently: run a people search, select the matching images, and add the name as a keyword.
These features are also great for casual use. I don’t do a ton of formal portraiture, but I still use Excire’s facial-recognition tools to find images of family and friends. They’re fast, accurate, and a lot more convenient than relying on folder names or memory.
Now, Lightroom Classic does offer facial-recognition tools of its own. But in my experience, these are just too inconsistent to use and the workflow isn’t up to par, so I gave up on them long ago. I’ve tested Lightroom’s native tools and Excire Search’s tools side by side a few times over the years, and I far prefer the plugin’s results, not to mention its general approach to people searching.
4. You Can Automatically Tag Your Images With Descriptive Keywords
If you’ve spent time using Lightroom Classic’s keywording tools, you’ll know that the process is entirely manual. And if you’re trying to organize a large image catalog or you regularly capture a high volume of images, keywording can easily become one of the most tedious parts of your workflow. (That’s why, for many photographers, it gets skipped entirely!)
But adding descriptive keywords to your files does matter. Keywords make your photo library more searchable, and they’re also important if you upload your images to stock websites.
Now, when it comes to quickly finding specific photos, Excire Search 2024 does include the prompt search, the similarity search, and the people search (discussed above!). But the Lightroom plugin also offers AI-powered automatic keywording.
When you initialize a new set of images, Excire automatically analyzes each shot and applies a variety of descriptive keywords based on their content. This happens in the background and doesn’t require any manual input, so you can fully keyword a huge photo library in just a few hours.
This is helpful for stock photographers, but it also unlocks another method of finding photos: the Excire Search by Keyword tool.
While the plugin’s prompt-search feature is more flexible and freeform, the keyword search tool can still be helpful, especially when you want to quickly filter by straightforward content categories like “mountain,” “dog,” and “owl,” or you want to see images that match a specific color palette.
Plus, because Excire allows layered search, you can start with a keyword search and then apply a prompt search on top of the results. This kind of compound filtering makes it much easier to zero in on exactly what you’re looking for, even in catalogs that contain hundreds of thousands of images.
You can also control how Excire’s keywords are integrated into Lightroom Classic. If you want the keywords to appear in the Lightroom Keywording panel, you can choose to transfer them into the catalog directly. Or, if you prefer to keep the Excire keywords separate, you can leave them in Excire’s database and use them strictly for Excire keyword searches.
Either way, you get a powerful way to filter and organize your images—without the need for a tedious manual keywording workflow.
5. You Can Clean Up Your Catalog With Advanced Duplicate Detection
Over the years, I’ve ended up with more duplicate and near-duplicate files in my Lightroom catalog than I’d care to admit—RAW copies, multiple versions of edited JPEGs, and near-identical shots taken in burst mode. All of this adds up to a Lightroom catalog that’s slower, messier, and harder to manage than it should be. Plus, those extra images take up space!
Fortunately, Excire Search 2024 includes a powerful Search for Duplicates tool that can help clean up your Lightroom catalog. In just a few clicks, you can scan your entire image library for duplicate or near-duplicate files, then delete the images you don’t want.
What makes this tool especially effective is how configurable it is. You can target specific folders, plus you can limit the search to exact duplicates (i.e., files with the same resolution, format, and content) or expand it to include near duplicates, where you control how broadly Excire looks for visual similarity. For example, Excire Search can group together images from a portrait session where the background remained the same but the subject’s pose changed as you took photos. And the plugin can also detect bursts of images and group them together for easy culling.
Once a duplicate search is complete, Excire automatically places each group of similar images into a Lightroom Collection. From there, it’s easy to review each set, keep your favorites, and remove the extras—either from your Lightroom catalog or your hard drive.
And by the way, when you’re reviewing near-duplicate images and you’re not sure which image in a group is strongest, Excire’s intelligent aesthetic ratings can help. The plugin uses AI to evaluate how visually pleasing each image appears and assigns a corresponding aesthetic score (from 1-100), which you can then use to sort your near-duplicate image sets.
You can also use the Search by Aesthetics tool to rank your entire catalog from best to worst. Of course, your aesthetic tastes may differ from the Excire AI’s, but it can still be a useful starting point when identifying your best shots, especially when you’re working with large batches of near-identical images.
Bottom line: Excire’s deduplication tool and aesthetic ratings make it far simpler to keep your catalog tidy and focused. As a result, your catalog will be far neater and more focused, and you may save a lot of money on image storage in the long run!
Try This Lightroom Plugin for Yourself!
As I said at the beginning, Excire Search 2024 is a fantastic Lightroom plugin for photographers of all stripes. The software offers a powerful set of tools that make managing your Lightroom Classic catalog an absolute breeze; if you’re a professional, you can expect to save countless hours in your work with clients, and if you’re an enthusiast (or even a casual photographer), Excire Search will ensure that you can keep your catalog accessible and organized with minimal effort.
With prompt-search AI, you can find specific images instantly, while similarity search helps you curate cohesive image collections in just a few clicks. Facial recognition makes it easy to find and organize photos of people, automatic keywording bypasses tedious manual tagging workflows, and duplicate detection (combined with aesthetic analysis) helps you keep your catalog neat and tidy.
Importantly, all of these tools integrate directly into the Lightroom Classic environment. You don’t have to switch to a separate app or overhaul your editing process. You can manage and edit your photos as usual inside Lightroom; Excire simply handles the heavy lifting in the background.
And unlike many AI tools, the Excire Search plugin runs entirely on your local machine. Your images are never uploaded to the cloud, so there are no privacy or data security concerns. Plus, since Excire is available as a lifetime license, there are no recurring subscription costs to worry about.
If you’re interested in Excire Search, the best way to get started is to try it out yourself. You can download a 14-day free trial or learn more about the plugin on the Excire website!
