As an avid wildlife photographer I often come home with loads of shots to process. For two reasons I just cannot face spending hours sorting through them in Lightroom. First is I work in IT. I do photography to escape the daily grind of hours sat in front of a computer. Second is I am lazy at heart. As a result my Lightroom catalogue us a huge mess. So I decided I needed some sort of automated way to tag images with their species and if they are way out of focus so I can cull a little faster. So here is a little tool I put together to automatically identify species with the help of local and free on computer AI to do the work for me. There is an option to use paid cloud AI but I have not felt the need to use that, mainly as I am a tight wad.

Wildlife Tagger is a free plugin for Adobe Lightroom Classic on Windows and macOS. It works out which species is in each of your wildlife photos, adds the species as keywords and can give each photo a star rating based on how sharp the subject is.

• Looks at the photos in the folder you have open in Lightroom: birds, insects, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, plants and fungi.
• Adds the species as keywords, in your language, with the scientific name as a synonym.
• Uses where the photo was taken to favour species that actually live there.
• Can give each photo a star rating based on how sharp the subject is, plus exposure and noise.
• Free and offline by default, with an optional, more accurate cloud AI.

Download the latest version

There is something deeply ironic about wildlife photography. It is supposed to celebrate wild animals. To bring people closer to nature. To make us care about creatures that most of us would otherwise walk past without noticing. And yet, sometimes, the wildlife seems to be the least important part of the equation. The photographer wants the photograph. The birdwatcher wants the sighting. The social-media audience wants something spectacular. And somewhere in the middle of all this human activity is an animal that never asked to become anybody's subject. Perhaps it is time we asked an uncomfortable question: When does wildlife photography stop being about wildlife and start being about us?

In various fields and hides, like minded R7 owners and I have been chatting about setting up our new toys to maximize chances of getting the shot. Here I detail my current setup and my often miss-guided thoughts on why I have my camera configured this way.

As winter turns to spring and the first snowdrops burst into flower, my mind begins to think of the impending arrival of migrating birds, and the many hours of photographic excitement they bring. From cuckoo to chats, swift, swallows, martins, warblers and any more, all bring smiles and chances for a shot or two thousand. One group however has me whiling away the warm evenings more than any other, and that is the terns, mainly the common terns in my area. 

Reviews really are not my thing. I cannot talk about MTF curves, CA, variation etc and will fall asleep reading such reviews if I try. So this article is about my real world experience with this wonderful toy, and showing what I a muppet like me has managed with it. By calling it a "wonderful toy" at the start I have already given away the conclusion, but how did I get there.

Just a few years ago I would have been overjoyed to get a distant shot if a cuckoo, but one bird has re-aligned my expectations.