Pattern Recognition Company (PRC) has launched the latest iteration of its photo-management program, Excire Foto 2024. Among other features, it lets AI evaluate your photos – and that’s the feature we’ll talk about the most. But of course, we’ll get you acquainted with other features, too, as some of them could be quite useful.

Like all AI-based photo software, Excire Foto 2024 is also designed to give you a time-saving approach to image organization. The latest version allows you to search images based on textual prompts, automatically categorize your photos, recognize faces, and as I mentioned – evaluate your photos’ aesthetics. And let’s start with this one, as I personally find it the most interesting and the most controversial.

Evaluate photos with X-tetics AI – can AI judge your photos?

X-tetics AI a newly designed feature of Excire Foto 2024. It’s created “to accurately judge image aesthetics,” according to PRC. The program was trained using hundreds of thousands of photos and “extensive input from expert photographers.” However, the company doesn’t disclose which databases they used to train the algorithm.

The X-tetics AI feature independently evaluates each image you upload to your catalog. Then, it outputs a unique Aesthetics Score for each file. “Aesthetics ratings can then be used to swiftly identify the most shareable – and most deletable – images from photoshoots, as well as to uncover hidden gems from deep within an image database,” the company writes.

But can AI really judge the aesthetic and artistic value of an image? Oh boy. I remembered discussing this before when I wrote about Everypixel Aesthetics. This website uses neural networks to tell you how “awesome” your photos are, and the results were, well… Unexpected. Take a look.

Okay, that was in 2017, and AI has undoubtedly progressed a lot since then. But can it really judge your photos? Can it tell you what’s worth sharing and what isn’t? To some extent, sure. AI can recognize, for example, photos that are too blurry, too grainy, or composed breaking the Rule of Thirds, Symmetry, Triangles, or other composition rules.

But the problem arises when breaking those rules and taking blurry or grainy photos is an artistic choice. In cases like this, can AI still tell whether your photos are “good enough?” I say hell no, but I might be wrong. I’d like to hear your thoughts on that.

And now, let’s move on to the rest of Excire Foto 2024’s features. In my opinion, these are the ones that can actually be useful and applicable.

Instantly find any image with X-prompt AI

Okay, this is a tool that I need as I can be terrible at naming my folders and hence finding the photos I have in mind. Thanks to X-prompt AI, you can find files in your Excire databases by inputting a text description. For example, type in “fast red motorcycle on a country road at sunset,” and the program will find you the photo(s) containing what you described.

“Excire’s powerful AI engine is capable of understanding complex sentences, context, and even abstract concepts such as ‘happiness’ and ‘sorrow,’” PRC says “Gone are the days of searching endlessly for lost files; instead, if the user can describe it, they can find it.”

Automatically categorize files with X-tags AI

X-tags AI is not a completely new tool within Excire software. However, the latest version boasts a revamped engine with enhanced content-detection capabilities. This tool analyzes each photo upon import. It then adds relevant keywords to help you in future search and categorization. Thanks to X-tags AI, you can skip the tedious manual keywording and let Excire do the heavy lifting.

Manage photos with X-face AI and X-alike AI

X-face AI and X-alike AI are two more features for finding, organizing, and culling your photos. X-face AI’s facial-recognition technology lets you categorize and retrieve files containing specific people, but also certain facial characteristics. You can search for prompts like age, sex, and the presence of a smile. As for X-alike AI, its image analysis enables you to search for similar files based on an initial image prompt. You can also identify near-duplicate images for deletion.

Just like X-tags AI, these two features also first appeared in previous iterations of Excire Foto. However, the latest version has been upgraded for improved results, according to PRC.

Additional new features

Other than the five major new and improved features we discussed above, Excire Foto 2024 brings a few more:

• Excire Analytics, a tool designed to assess photo collections. It offers insights into the user’s photography behavior such as their essential gear and top photo subjects. Analytics was previously available only as a paid Excire Foto 2022 extension, but Excire Foto 2024 offers automatic integration with the program.
• A slideshow function, so that photographers can display image collections to friends, family, and clients
• A custom-status label, so that photographers can mark image collections as “In progress” or “Done” as they move through their organizational workflow
• GPS-based search, which enables users to search for and quickly retrieve images based on location data; the tool also lets users manually edit and add GPS coordinates as needed.

Price & Availability

Excire Foto 2024 is already available for download and you can get it for both Windows and macOS. The software’s MSRP is $189, but there’s a limited-time launch discount, so you can get it for $149.  If you’re an existing Excire Foto 2022 user, you can upgrade to Excire Foto 2024 for $59. If you’re not sure and just want to test it out first, a 14-day trial version is also available for download. You can learn more about Excire Foto 2024 and get the software on PRC’s website.

---