Excire Analytics is a plugin/module for the Excire Photo software package, for those who are not aware Excire Foto is a Digital Asset Management (photo) software that uses machine learning to automatically tag your images based on content (number of people, age groups, animals et al) and composition (i.e. leading lines, colors). The Analytics module is an add-on to this software that provides analytical information based on the parameters of your images.

Without going into too much detail, when you capture a photo, information called metadata is recorded into the file by your camera. This metadata includes information on the camera that was used, when the photo was taken, the camera settings (i.e. shutter speed, aperture, ISO), and often other information where it is collected (i.e. GPS).

Excire Analytics analyses information from the metadata to:

• which camera or lens you have used most
• what your favorite subjects are and what you use to shoot them
• which settings or which camera-lens-combinations you used to take your best rated pictures
• which lens is particularly suitable for which subjects
• which lenses you take with you on your trip and what you can safely leave at home
• which photo genre you are particularly good at
• up to which exposure time your telephoto lens still takes good photos
• which camera or lenses you almost don’t use at all and therefore could sell

My Experiences

To get a better idea of the software, Excire provided me with a license so that I could do some videos and blog posts (however, they did not pay me to write this, and have no control over the content). I used Excire Analytics on my catalogue of around 1200+ photos and found the software very intuitive to use, I could show graphs (bar horizontal, bar vertical, pie, doughnut, stack and heatmap) which showed a range of parameters (including but not limited to camera, lens, focal length, keywords, shutter speed, aperture), these graphs showed the number of photos I had taken for a given parameter, or the percentage of photos (usually when hovered over, although some graphs also show the actual value). For example if I showed a graph by keyword it identified that around 35% of my photos had the keyword “animal in them” (see below).

The Keyword was one of the messiest graphs, simply because there are so many keywords, that said whilst I left it on default settings you can limit the number of items that show up, for example to only show the top 5 entries (they call that an element), which makes it much neater. You can also change the graph type, or more importantly the parameter you are showing to get a better understanding of what cameras and lenses you commonly use (see below). In the example below, since 1st of Jan 2021, around 50% of my photos were taken with the Nikon D610, followed by the Sony, this makes sense as I only got the Sony semi-recently so the Nikon would be slightly more.

In addition to the camera information, I can also get more information on the lenses I most commonly used, the below graph gives information on all lenses used since 2021 (some are strangely labelled since I used lens converters to convert from Nikon F mount to Sony mounts which slightly messes with the EXIF information.

Figure 3: Lens information as determined by Excire Analytics without any filter.

Whilst the above includes all lenses, I can also start to narrow down so that I am only shown the lenses for a specific camera (i.e. the Sony I use on a regular basis), this starts to give me useful information around which lenses I use all the time, and which I don't so that I can make decisions, if I want to sell a lens which one do I get rid of, or even something like if I want to challenge myself to use a lens I rarely use, which one should I use?

This was just an example of some of the information that can be provided by Excire Analytics, you can show far more information and even show more than one attribute (depending on the graph type you use), I didn't focus too much on the interface in this post since I wanted to show the information more, but stay tuned and I will likely do a YouTube post on the interface which you can also watch. I found the plugin / module a useful addition to Excire Photo, it does require you to have a license for Excire Foto and functions as a module (i.e. it is not standalone), but I still think it gives a lot of useful information in a simple and easy to understand way.

For More Information

At the time of this post, the expected cost of Excire Analytics is not known, that said until the 31st of March Excire is offering a deal for people who want to purchase Excire Foto, if you use the coupon code AnalyticsDeal at checkout, it will reduce the price by the cost of Excire Analytics so you get that package for free. If you already own Excire Foto, there may be discounts around easter which reduce the price of Excire Analytics. As always if you want to find out more information, you can click on any of the links in this post, or click here.