@beachthorncombe
Excire Fotos recently cost me an outrageous £139 in a Black Friday sale, (a reduction on its usual obscene £199), but is, nonetheless, pretty underwhelming on two major fronts.
Duplicate Finding Feature.
On actioning the duplicate finder, a user can eventually see them displayed but there’s no bulk delete or auto-marking so tedious manual selection is the only option; in this regard, Excire’s description of the duplicate feature is very misleading because it actually offers less means or ability to manage and then delete images than, (just about) any other duplication finding app on the market whether it were a paid or for free version.
Aesthetic/Quality Scoring Feature.
Likewise, the advertised Aesthetic/Quality scoring feature linked to its AI is just as underwhelming. Meaning, sure, it exists, but it’s largely a manual / interactive exercise to check one image by another, (unless Aesthetics is chosen as a filter option), because it doesn’t auto-rank or aid you when staring at a gallery of potential images. Meaning, again, you’re essentially on your own when it comes to choosing images, whether to keep or delete.
OK. Yes. I grit my teeth when I confess, in a grudging fashion, that I appreciate the features that do work with the app, (being a very useful content manager with a licence allowing installation on 3 devices), but value wise, is it actually better than the fabulous Eagle Cool content manager at only £26 with a 2 PC licence?
Yes. The AI search feature is useful but then again, the open source STAG app that I use on some of my MX Linux based machines is pretty good also though a little rough around the edges.
So … Excire Fotos for PC? ABSOLUTELY NO WAY WORTH THE £200 IT NORMALLY COSTS and only possibly worth £139 because I can use it on 3 machines.
And my biggest regret of all? Not finding someone like myself writing a review of Excire Fotos before I parted with my cash!
UPDATE.
Image Culling.
What Excire describe as duplicate processing or culling is more an assisted, suggestion based review of files that, ultimately, tediously, require you, (as a human), to manually make an executive decision to delete or process.
The only ‘auto’ help you get is where Excire Fotos does recognise exact duplicates, corrupt files or unsupported formats.
Bottom line.
My eclectic needs requires Excire Fotos to ‘appreciate’ terabytes (40 yrs worth) of my own autobiographical data including documentary images, archaeological context, personal geography, imperfect but irreplaceable shots and image and video based multi-media.
I am preserving, as a legacy-driven project; a personal quest of encyclopaedic size, width and breadth and Excire Fotos is failing me big time simply because, in my eyes, it was created for wedding photographers, stock imagery or social media slop.
My media is too precious to trust to this useful but over-hyped and underwhelming product. 🙁
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