Welcome!

[Eric Shieh]

Welcome! Post your questions here.

[Robert Oslin]

I just want to say: this tool (so far) is phenomenal! I am a bird photographer, and manually having to keyword my birds in Lightroom is a complete pain in the neck - let alone the effort of having to look up birds when I'm not sure as to the classification (granted, Merlin is incredible, but it requires out-of-band analysis, then I have to manually enter the keywords). I'm going to try this tool on some of my more complex birds (to ID), but so far it's done a good job with some more common species. I am curios as to how you trained the bird images? Did you scrape all of Merlin's bird pics or e-bird user uploaded pics? There are probably millions in those which could help increase the accuracy of identification. 

Main question: My current Keyword list in LR is well structured, following a hiearchy of birds > bird species name. When I categorize with your LR plugin it assisngs the right name, but under "bird", not "birds". Now my hierarchy is broken as the keyword shows: "golden crowned kinglet, bird", and the keyword is added to my root of the keyword list, vs. under my Birds top level list item. Aside from me always renaming Bird to Birds, is there a way to edit your keyword list, to make those changes once and for all, so that Birds (instead of Bird) applies? Sorry if this question is confusing and rambling. 

Follow-up question: Does it identify butterflies?

I am going to put this tool through its paces and if it works well I'm going to recommend to many other fellow birders. 

THANK YOU!

[Robert Oslin]

Okay - I just ran again and this one (a sanderlin) was classified as Birds, so that worked fine. Not sure why it gets added to the root of my keyword list though...

 I have Birds > Sanderlin in my list, but this newly classified image gets put at the root directory as sanderling, and as crocethia_alba. I'll need to play with it.

[Eric Shieh]

Hi Robert,

Welcome! Bird ID is one of the primary reasons for the existence of CrossPrism so I hope it works well for you.

Having said that, the default Lightroom plugin settings are designed for general photography.  You should narrow down the domain to "nature" to eliminate the generalized classifications. There's also an optional Parent Keyword that should help you match your existing keyword structure.

For the more complex classifications, you can choose the "birds" sub-domain of nature. This causes the top 5 bird classifications to be displayed. The default, unqualified nature domain handles a gamut of birds, mammals, insects (including butterflies), flowers/leaves, oceanic animals, reptiles, and amphibians.

The main CrossPrism app also has a "List Classifier" under the Tools menu for difficult scenarios: when the domains matches those of the Lightroom plugin, it will display more details about the classifications and allow you to research the choices.  Here's a short YouTube video of it in action: https://youtu.be/SfJhc35b2yc

btw,  I'm curious how did you found us?  

Cheers,

Eric

[Robert Oslin]

Thanks! This was super helpful. So far the classifications are pretty good, although I had one bird where different images resulted in one classified as hooded warbler, the other as kentucky - mind you this was a difficult one as I wasn't even sure, as it was a juvenile. That's perfectly to be expected because some I will have to do deeper research on to ensure they are accurate (heck, sparrows and flycatchers are super hard). 

I found you through google search for AI automatic classification of birds in lightroom. Happened upon an Adobe post. 

What I really need is a way for it to batch classify - go through my thousands of bird pics and attempt to classify those automatically, rather than one by one. Then I could always browse through my bird pics and correct ones that have been mis-classified. This would save me hours (or weeks) of having to manually classify each image. Perhaps this tool aready does that, but I haven't watched all the youtube videos yet. 

BTM, a product manager and am currently learning AI and LLM+RAG, working with Python to do about one small project a day (so that I can learn the ropes). This is the kind of much longer project that I was thinking about in the back of my mind, and was excited to see that someone has already taken the initiative to do this. 

[Eric Shieh]

Yes, batch processing is supported when multiple photos have been selected; though I'd advise flagging or adding an extra keyword to mark the images as automated so that it's easier to review later on.

To answer an earlier question, much of the nature data comes from iNaturalist with a little bit from observation.org. If I remember correctly, the bird dataset is ~13M images. I'm in the process of updating it with about 5M more from 2023.

Trying not to get too distracted with the generative AI boom, but a secondary use of CrossPrism is labeling training data for stable diffusion fine-tuning. I've also recently dabbled with llama.cpp in my spare time for making personalized LLMs. It's hard to stay focused!

Cheers,

Eric

[Robert Oslin]

Thanks so much! Can't wait to play with this tool! And look forward to the updated (+5M training) model. Cool stuff!