# Finding an image by example (reverse search, not using metadata)



## Linwood Ferguson (Mar 8, 2017)

Infrequently, but often enough to be annoying, I get a request that goes like this: "Can I get a larger version of this shot". 

Typically they "think" it was taken sometime last winter, but are not sure.  usually it's been cropped or otherwise changed, and of course it never has any embedded metadata.  

So I look for clues. These are usually sports shots, so try to find some opposing team uniform in the shot to find color, or other hints of when. Often I draw the conclusion it may not have even been one of my photos.

Yes... educate the customer, teach them to leave metadata in... all those ideas come to mind and are pointless.  It is what it is.

My question is this: Are there tools which can do a reverse image search on a lightroom catalog?  And be any good?

Some googling and the only thing I found is this.   Interestingly the word doesn't appear here on the forum at all, so it must not be too widely used.  Anyone tried it? 

It has a trial version so was thinking of pulling it down and experimenting, but wondered if there are other tools people have tried, or other techniques, that do not require metadata (not one such request for me has ever been solved by looking at metadata).


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## tspear (Mar 8, 2017)

Never used it, but looks really interesting to me.
If you try it, please report back. I have a project coming up which this could be really useful.


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## Victoria Bampton (Mar 8, 2017)

Excire was the one that sprung to mind. I haven't tried it yet, although I've talked with the developer.


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## clee01l (Mar 8, 2017)

Ferguson said:


> Infrequently, but often enough to be annoying, I get a request that goes like this: "Can I get a larger version of this shot"....
> Some googling and the only thing I found is this.   Interestingly the word doesn't appear here on the forum at all, so it must not be too widely used.  Anyone tried it?
> 
> It has a trial version so was thinking of pulling it down and experimenting, but wondered if there are other tools people have tried, or other techniques, that do not require metadata (not one such request for me has ever been solved by looking at metadata).


   I tried the trial version. It is an interesting concept and requires an exhaustive index of your cataloged images.  Once completed, it can find images by example.  While it is true that it does not rely on embedded metal tags, it does generate a separate and large file in your LR folder.   Though it might be worth the 99€,  I think the price is steep for casual use.


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## Johan Elzenga (Mar 8, 2017)

I'm trying it too. The indexing is about half way after six hours, so do this overnight. The € 99 is for the three plugin search functions. If you don't need facial expression recognition (I don't) then it's € 69 for two functions.


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## Linwood Ferguson (Mar 9, 2017)

Yeah, I'm thinking that too (pricy).  The needs I have are annoying but not terribly valuable to solve.  I'm curious what you find.  I had a basketball tournament game and was distracted today, hope to try later this week, but unless the pound is really low, that's pretty pricey for rmy needs.

I often wonder if tools like this wouldn't make more money at $10 and selling a LOT more of them.


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## PhilBurton (Mar 9, 2017)

clee01l said:


> I tried the trial version. It is an interesting concept and requires an exhaustive index of your cataloged images.  Once completed, it can find images by example.  While it is true that it does not rely on embedded metal tags, it does generate a separate and large file in your LR folder.   Though it might be worth the 99€,  I think the price is steep for casual use.


Cletus,

"exhaustive index" by Excire or by Lightroom?

At current exchange rates, that's about $120 or so.  Lightroom perpetual is only $149, so in a relative value sense I think that they should be charging say €40 for the bundle.

Phil


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## Johan Elzenga (Mar 9, 2017)

PhilBurton said:


> Cletus,
> 
> "exhaustive index" by Excire or by Lightroom?
> 
> ...



Excire makes an index of the photos, so it can search on similarities in the photos. A little like face recognition, but for much more than just faces. You type 'beach', and Excire finds photos of beaches, even if you did not label them with a keyword. Or you say 'Find photos that are similar to this photo' and Excire searches on photo content. That's quite a bit of info, and that shows. It took many hours to create the index. And it's big. My Lightroom catalog is 5 GB, the Excire index file is 1 GB. Excire also makes a backup file (at the same location).

The price is debatable, but I think it's a useless debate. We can't change it. Please note that the € 99 is for all three modules. You may not need all three (I'm not interested in the face recognition module that can search for smiling people, for example). In that case you can buy two of the three for € 69, which seems a fairly reasonable price to me. One module is € 49, so I think two modules is the best value for money.


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## Johan Elzenga (Mar 9, 2017)

My first impression is that the plugin is pretty good, but far from perfect. Searching is fast and the results are sometimes impressive, sometimes less. If you search for similar photos, you do find sometimes a photo you had almost forgotten and is really quite similar, so that is a bonus. Searching on 'Plane' on the other hand resulted in dozens of photos of flying birds. Maybe that's because those birds were shot in Africa, and in Swahili the word for 'plane' and 'bird' is the same ('ndege') ?


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## clee01l (Mar 9, 2017)

JohanElzenga said:


> My first impression is that the plugin is pretty good, but far from perfect. Searching is fast and the results are sometimes impressive, sometimes less


Those were my sentiments too.   And I agree with others that the price point is too high for a LR plugin.  I think the plugin authors could do better financially at a lower price. 
I might be wrong, but this plugin may work as a standalone app on any collection of images in folders which would expand the potential user pool beyond simply LR users.


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## Johan Elzenga (Mar 9, 2017)

The verdict is still out, but I doubt I'm going to buy it. Or perhaps I'll only buy the module that searches for visible similar images. The keyword module is good for some keywords, but poor for others. If I search for 'waterfall', the results are impressive. But if I search for 'Church (exterior)', the plugin finds perhaps 10% of all images that have a church on it. A search for 'Palm Tree' gave a decent result, but when I combined 'Palm Tree' and 'Sunset/Sunrise' it only found three sunset images, none of them with a palm tree... I do like the module that searches for visible similar images, however. It works fairly well and sometimes gives a result I wouldn't have thought of (and sometimes a result that I simply can't understand at all because there is no similarity I can think of).

The plugin installs as a separate application (with a link in your Lightroom plugins folder), so it should indeed possible to let it work with other kinds of image collections too.


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## Roelof Moorlag (Mar 9, 2017)

Does Excire have similarities to the search options in Lightroom mobile web? 
I can search there for beaches , even if i didn't label them with such a keyword, and find them anyway (also in other languages than my own) I wonder if Adobe will make this (very) strong search engine available in the desktop application too (i wish!). If they do, a plugin like Excire maybe redundant.


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## Johan Elzenga (Mar 9, 2017)

Roelof Moorlag said:


> Does Excire have similarities to the search options in Lightroom mobile web?
> I can search there for beaches , even if i didn't label them with such a keyword, and find them anyway (also in other languages than my own) I wonder if Adobe will make this (very) strong search engine available in the desktop application too (i wish!). If they do, a plugin like Excire maybe redundant.



There are some similarities, but there are also big differences. Adobe search only works on your uploaded images. Because the search engine is online, they can't integrate it in Lightroom to work locally (unless you would synch your entire catalog). What they could do is use it to suggest keywords, like is already done in 'Publish to Adobe Stock'. Lightroom would upload a small version of an image, and then the Adobe servers would come back with keyword suggestions based on image recognition. I already suggested that to Adobe, because that would be very powerful, but that is very different from what Excire does. Excire *is* the image recognition search engine, installed on your computer and so capable of searching your entire catalog. It also does not need an internet connection.

Because of how it works, Excire can only search on a limited number of keywords. For example, you can search on 'beach' or 'lake', but if you want to search on 'water' or 'sea' you're out of luck. Because the search is based on image recognition, the search keywords are pre-determined. You can however select an image of the sea, and then do a search for similar images. That is another module and that one simply looks for similar images, without 'knowing' what the subject is. It works fine and will get you a lot of other sea images. For me this module is far more interesting than the too limited keyword search module.


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## ExcireDeveloper (Mar 10, 2017)

Hello! I am the Excire developer Victoria mentioned – thank you Victoria for linking me in here!

First, I would like to say that Excire Search is not a typical Lr plugin but rather a standalone and powerful AI machine, which, as some of you mentioned, runs locally on your PC and does not require any uploads to the cloud.  We think that this can justify the price.  And there is the free trial version – you only pay if you like it.

As in case of similar AI technology (Google, Adobe) the results are not perfect but good enough to generate value. We are continuously improving it and will, for example, increase the number of keywords and add further functionality. All updates of the modules are free of charge - you pay only once.

We do indeed create our own catalogue that should have a size of about 650 MB for 100.000 images. Initialization does take some time but is much faster since version 1.2.4 (especially for Windows).

Currently we use the Excire catalogue for the search but will soon release Excire Search TT, which will let you transfer the keywords to the Lightroom catalogue / image metadata – this will let you search by using the Lr search functions.

If you want to stay tuned and receive all the updates, I would recommend subscribing to the Excire newsletter. We will also, very soon, launch the Excire Forum at www.excire.com.  Personally, I do enjoy using Excire search mainly because it gives me a new kind of access to my images. The more images you have (I have about 100k), and the more you use Excire, the more you appreciate that.


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## Johan Elzenga (Mar 10, 2017)

One thing you need to consider is a short manual, packed with the plugin. After the plugin is installed, it tells you that it needs to index the images. But what about when you import new images? There is a menu item 'Update Photos', and I assume that you need to run this if you want to include any new images in the Excire database. Do you get a warning that you need to run 'Update Photos' after you've imported images? I haven't tried that yet.


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## Johan Elzenga (Mar 10, 2017)

By the way, for anyone who might be interested in the functionality I describe here:



JohanElzenga said:


> Lightroom would upload a small version of an image, and then the Adobe servers would come back with keyword suggestions based on image recognition.



That is already possible with another plugin. Have a look at MyKeyworder.


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## ExcireDeveloper (Mar 10, 2017)

JohanElzenga said:


> One thing you need to consider is a short manual, packed with the plugin. After the plugin is installed, it tells you that it needs to index the images. But what about when you import new images? There is a menu item 'Update Photos', and I assume that you need to run this if you want to include any new images in the Excire database. Do you get a warning that you need to run 'Update Photos' after you've imported images? I haven't tried that yet.


Thank you the comments! We are right now working on a FAQ and further instructions in the forum and will also update the in-app manual. 'Update Photos' is for the case that you edit a photo strongly (e.g. major crop) such that the edit would effect keywords and similarity. In order to initialize new images, just restart initialization.


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## tspear (Mar 10, 2017)

JohanElzenga said:


> By the way, for anyone who might be interested in the functionality I describe here:
> 
> 
> 
> That is already possible with another plugin. Have a look at MyKeyworder.



Looks really cool. Wondering if I decide to play with these tools will send me back down a rat hole on keywords for my images....


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## Johan Elzenga (Mar 10, 2017)

ExcireDeveloper said:


> Thank you the comments! We are right now working on a FAQ and further instructions in the forum and will also update the in-app manual. 'Update Photos' is for the case that you edit a photo strongly (e.g. major crop) such that the edit would effect keywords and similarity. In order to initialize new images, just restart initialization.



Thanks, that confirms an FAQ is needed! BTW, I think it should be possible to search on Keyword A *or* Keyword B as well. Right now you can only search for A *and* B, so if you want to search for A *or* B you have to perform two searches and not clear the resulting collection in between these searches. Doable, but not very elegant and not all people may think of that workaround.


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## ExcireDeveloper (Mar 10, 2017)

JohanElzenga said:


> Thanks, that confirms an FAQ is needed! BTW, I think it should be possible to search on Keyword A *or* Keyword B as well. Right now you can only search for A *and* B, so if you want to search for A *or* B you have to perform two searches and not clear the resulting collection in between these searches. Doable, but not very elegant and not all people may think of that workaround.


In our lab version - to be released soon - we already have the A OR B.  One more confirmation ...


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## Linwood Ferguson (Mar 11, 2017)

I'm glad to see this discussion. I haven't tried it yet, partly because been busy, but mostly I am not sure I have a need to justify it.  It's a handful of requests I get a year.  But I'm not sure, so as you trail-blazers go first, please do keep reporting back.  And to the Excire developer, thanks for showing up, it always helps when someone knowledgeable is available for questions.

I think the fundamental problem for me is that my use would be infrequent (after playing for a while).  

Now... if you want an idea, I bet sports shooters could use a directed facial recognition system.  We could give you sample faces of everyone on both teams, a collection of shots, and you figure out who everyone in a shot is limiting it to that set.  As opposed to LR which just shows you faces and chooses among possibly hundreds or thousands of prior picks. Just a thought.   Throw in some smarts on jersey colors and numbers and you might make it even more intelligent.  Not just photographers either, I know the school gets requests from various media for "do you have a shot of Goodwin we can use", and they start looking through the stack I gave them from each game.  There are subscription services for things like jersey numbers and names for each school -- but a human still has to enter them (e.g. they enter FG25 and it pops up "FGCU Forward Senior #25 Marc-Eddy Norelia" for the caption).  Like that and your recognition and the human might not have to enter anything.


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## ExcireDeveloper (Mar 11, 2017)

Ferguson said:


> I'm glad to see this discussion. I haven't tried it yet, partly because been busy, but mostly I am not sure I have a need to justify it.  It's a handful of requests I get a year.  But I'm not sure, so as you trail-blazers go first, please do keep reporting back.  And to the Excire developer, thanks for showing up, it always helps when someone knowledgeable is available for questions.
> 
> I think the fundamental problem for me is that my use would be infrequent (after playing for a while).
> 
> Now... if you want an idea, I bet sports shooters could use a directed facial recognition system.  We could give you sample faces of everyone on both teams, a collection of shots, and you figure out who everyone in a shot is limiting it to that set.  As opposed to LR which just shows you faces and chooses among possibly hundreds or thousands of prior picks. Just a thought.   Throw in some smarts on jersey colors and numbers and you might make it even more intelligent.  Not just photographers either, I know the school gets requests from various media for "do you have a shot of Goodwin we can use", and they start looking through the stack I gave them from each game.  There are subscription services for things like jersey numbers and names for each school -- but a human still has to enter them (e.g. they enter FG25 and it pops up "FGCU Forward Senior #25 Marc-Eddy Norelia" for the caption).  Like that and your recognition and the human might not have to enter anything.


Thank you Fergusen for the idea! We are already working along those lines and may get back to you regarding the sample data.


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## Victoria Bampton (Mar 12, 2017)

I also came across this, could be interesting: https://photofocus.com/2017/03/11/fast-easy-photo-keywording-from-the-cloud/


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## Linwood Ferguson (Mar 12, 2017)

The cloud one is interesting, I wonder if it just sends a tiny preview up, as uploading all images with any resolution would take forever. 

But it doesn't appear to do search by example, which was my original need.

I wonder if it is time to try facial recognition again -- has anyone heard that Adobe has done anything to improve it?   I can't say I have read every release note since its release, but I cannot recall any of them saying "significant improvement in facial recognition" or similar.


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## Linwood Ferguson (Mar 12, 2017)

I released my last post may seem contradictory -- I wanted search by example, but facial recognition might work.  at issue for me is almost always the requests for "do you have a larger/recrop version of this image" is someone recognizable, player or staff.


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## Linwood Ferguson (Mar 8, 2017)

Infrequently, but often enough to be annoying, I get a request that goes like this: "Can I get a larger version of this shot". 

Typically they "think" it was taken sometime last winter, but are not sure.  usually it's been cropped or otherwise changed, and of course it never has any embedded metadata.  

So I look for clues. These are usually sports shots, so try to find some opposing team uniform in the shot to find color, or other hints of when. Often I draw the conclusion it may not have even been one of my photos.

Yes... educate the customer, teach them to leave metadata in... all those ideas come to mind and are pointless.  It is what it is.

My question is this: Are there tools which can do a reverse image search on a lightroom catalog?  And be any good?

Some googling and the only thing I found is this.   Interestingly the word doesn't appear here on the forum at all, so it must not be too widely used.  Anyone tried it? 

It has a trial version so was thinking of pulling it down and experimenting, but wondered if there are other tools people have tried, or other techniques, that do not require metadata (not one such request for me has ever been solved by looking at metadata).


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## tspear (Mar 12, 2017)

Ferguson said:


> I wonder if it is time to try facial recognition again -- has anyone heard that Adobe has done anything to improve it?   I can't say I have read every release note since its release, but I cannot recall any of them saying "significant improvement in facial recognition" or similar.



I have not paid close enough to the release notes to see if Adobe has formally stated anything. However, I have noticed over the year that the facial tagging appears to be faster and more reliable. Not sure if this is because of changes Adobe has made, or because I have built up a better database of tagged individuals.

Tim


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## Kirby Krieger (Mar 22, 2017)

Does the search-by-example function work across scales?  For instance, if I use a picture of a bearded man as input, will it find its understanding of the image of a bearded man at any scale in the images in my catalog, or will it find only images with one bearded man (ignoring completely face-recognition here — "bearded man" is just an example)?

Is Excire in any way customizable?  User-defined fuzziness?  Matches which emphasize color more and shape less?  Any interaction with the AI engine?  Any access to the catalog Excire creates?

I just downloaded the trial.


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