Excire Search 2026 review: AI-powered image searching in Lightroom Classic

If you have a large or even a more modest Lightroom Classic catalog, you’re probably aware of how difficult it can sometimes be to find specific photos. This is a problem Excire Search 2026 aims to solve with AI-powered image search, while also offering time-saving photo-culling capabilities to help you edit shoots more quickly than before.

This probably all sounds too good to be true, and it may be, but you’ll have to read on to find out. What I can say at this point is that my interest was certainly piqued when I discovered the capabilities of this plugin. Like most things in life, it’s not perfect, but it may have the capabilities to aid your workflow if you can justify the cost.

Excire Search 2026 is a Lightroom Classic plugin developed by the German company Excire. It uses local artificial intelligence to analyse the content of your images, building a searchable database that’s on your computer and not in the cloud. This means your data isn’t shared, and no data centers are required for data processing.

In a nutshell, software features include intelligent search, automatic organization and AI-assisted culling. It's available with a perpetual license, so no annoying subscriptions.

Excire Search 2026: System requirements

Excire Search 2026: Price

Excire Search 2026 is the latest version of the software and can be purchased directly on the Excire website. The plugin costs $229 / £199, so it’s not cheap considering the cost of some other Lightroom Classic plugins that are available, but this is a perpetual license; once you have it, you don’t have to worry about ongoing costs.

With this in mind, it’s useful that there’s a 14-day free trial available, so you can try before you buy to be sure that Excire Search 2026 is going to be useful for you. If you struggle to find photos and spend a lot of time manually culling photos after shoots, it could be just what you need.

Excire Search 2026: Key Features

Excire Search 2026 is an AI-powered plugin for Adobe Lightroom Classic that significantly enhances how photographers and videographers manage and search their photo catalog. Designed for both professionals and enthusiasts, it integrates directly into Lightroom for a seamless workflow.

Under the hood, the software uses advanced AI to analyze image and video content automatically. It recognises faces, objects, scenes, colors, lighting conditions, emotions and movement, allowing users to perform intuitive searches.

Six search modes underpin this capability, including prompt-based text search, similarity search, people and face search and keyword search without having to manually tag photos beforehand. Excire Search 2026 can also find videos, which is useful, but Lightroom isn’t the best software for video because it can’t read footage captured in Log color profiles.

Further to not needing to manually tag photos, Excire can automate keyword tagging directly into Lightroom’s catalog, identifying duplicates and near-duplicates, and enabling deep filtering by both content and metadata. This makes navigating even large photo libraries fast and efficient, which eliminates time-consuming manual sorting.

An impressive and useful feature in the 2026 version is AI-assisted culling. This tool is designed to reduce the time spent reviewing images after shoots. It groups images by scene, people or capture sequence, then evaluates them using criteria such as sharpness, facial expression, and overall aesthetics. Face sharpness detection allows quick technical checks, while best-shot detection highlights the strongest images instantly. You, of course, maintain control over which photos are ultimately deleted.

Excire Search 2026: Interface, usability & performance

Once installed, you have to initialize your Lightroom Classic catalog so Excire Search 2026 has all of your photos loaded in to allow it to do its job. I initialized a catalog of over 70,000 photos, which took several hours to complete.

You also have to initialize your photos every time you import more to the catalogue, but you only have to initialize the most recently imported photos, not the entire catalogue. Initialization is simply loading photos into the plugin, but it would be much better if initialization were automatic.

The user interface is easy to use and can be set to a couple of sizes, as well as being minimized to just a small panel that can sit out of the way. It’s this panel that allows you to access the different features offered by Excire Search 2026. The plugin is overall easy to use, but the photo culling feature is slightly more complicated, so taking advantage of video tutorials is useful.

The plugin works locally with no connection to data centers, making it GDPR-compliant. All processing takes place on your computer. The speed at which Excire Search 2026 performs searches is impressive, especially when considering how many images are in the catalog I was using for testing.

Search results were impressive, but when searching for specific photos I know are in the catalogue, it sometimes pulled up similar options but not the exact photo I was aiming for. Overall, the search functionality is impressive, but it’s not always perfect. Excire Search 2026 does, however, save a huge amount of time when searching for photos.

Excire Search 2026: Verdict

Excire search is a fantastic plugin that makes finding images in large Lightroom Classic catalogs easier than without. It’s not always perfect and can miss some photos, but the locally running artificial intelligence does a pretty good job overall. The software is generally easy to use, and there are lots of tutorial videos available on Excire’s YouTube channel if you need any help.

It’s not the cheapest Lightroom plugin available, but it is a perpetual license. One slightly annoying aspect of the plugin is that you have to re-initialize your photos every time you import more photos into the catalog. It’s not the end of the world, but it would be better if Excire could do this automatically. On the plus side here, you only have to initialize the images freshly installed, not the entire catalogue again.

Adobe Photoshop Elements is a classic beginner photo editing software that is a cut-down version of the full version of Photoshop, offering image cataloguing, Raw processing, and image manipulation tools.

RawTherapee offers powerful Raw processing for free. This open-source software produces great image quality, but this comes at the cost of a complicated user interface.