Posting with Tim's permission. Disclosure up front so there are no surprises: I've been building a Lightroom Classic plugin called Nomen that matches species in your photos and writes the metadata directly into your catalog. It will be a paid tool after the beta (lifetime Personal license is $29). I'm not here to sell it. I'm here because marine ID is the part of the tool I least trust, and this is the community that would actually know where it falls short.

A bit about me. I'm a wildlife and underwater photographer. I recently got back into diving after a long break and I've been rebuilding both my kit and my catalog, which is what pushed me to finish this. My Lightroom catalog has six figures of photos across land and underwater work, almost none of it properly keyworded, and the gap between "card full of dive photos" and "knowing what's actually in them" is the problem I was trying to close for myself.

What it does:

Select photos in Lightroom, click Match, review the results. It writes scientific name, common name, a structured keyword hierarchy (Nomen > Family > Genus > Species), IPTC captions, social-ready captions with camera settings and location, star ratings for match quality, and color labels for confidence. Everything runs locally on your machine, no uploads, no cloud.

The aquatic side covers 15 packs: fish (35,000+ species), sharks and rays, nudibranchs, corals and anemones, crustaceans, cephalopods, echinoderms, jellyfish, sponges, and more. There's a one-click "Select Underwater" option during setup that installs the full aquatic set. Dive region filters (Coral Triangle, Red Sea, Caribbean, Mediterranean, and others) narrow suggestions to where you were diving, and GPS from your photos is used automatically when present. When a match is close between two species, it flags both and lets you pick rather than guessing.

What I actually need from this community:

• People willing to run it against their own dive catalog and tell me honestly where it gets things wrong. Nudibranchs, juveniles, regional variants, cryptic species, wherever you have expertise and suspect a generalist tool would struggle, that's where I need eyes.

• Feedback on the UW workflow itself. Not just accuracy, but whether this is a useful thing to sit inside Lightroom or whether it belongs somewhere else in a dive photographer's process.

• Opinions on which taxa or regions feel most underserved by current ID tools. I want to prioritize where the tool would do the most good.

Beta testers get a lifetime Personal license in exchange for honest feedback. More important than testing, I'd love to hear thoughts in the thread from anyone with opinions on marine ID tooling, whether or not you want to try this one.

Happy to answer questions here. If anyone would rather discuss privately, DM me. Mods, if anything about this post is off, let me know and I'll adjust.

Brett

Could you post a video? I’m a bit worried about letting beta software start writing to my catalog, there is years of work there. Yes it’s backed up, but I still don’t want to test it.

Do you select an image in the grid, click search, it fills to the metadata fields, then I can save that or discard it? Does it add to the keywords or replace them?

Edited 2 hours ago2 hr by jlaity

Totally fair concern, and the right one to have before letting any new plugin near a real catalog. Short answer: yes, there's a preview-first workflow, Nomen doesn't overwrite existing keywords, and there's a feature to remove the IDs it wrote if you change your mind.

Workflow: you select one photo or a small batch in Lightroom, trigger the plugin, and it runs locally. Before anything is written to the catalog you get a review dialog showing the top 5 matches per photo with confidence scores. You can accept the top match, pick a different one, or skip that photo entirely. Each match has an iNaturalist button that opens the species page in your browser so you can cross-check against reference photos before committing. Nothing touches your catalog until you confirm.

On keywords specifically: it's purely additive. Matches go into their own keyword hierarchy (Nomen > Family > Genus > Species) so they stay isolated from whatever keyword structure you already have. Your existing keywords are never deleted or modified. If you decide you don't like what it did, there's an "Undo Nomen Match" feature that strips out everything it wrote to the selected photos, leaving your original metadata intact.

My honest recommendation: start with a single image, then a handful, then a small trip folder. Running it against a 100K-image catalog on day one would be a bad idea with any new tool, not just this one. There are usage guides on the site that walk through a cautious rollout.

I haven't recorded tutorial videos yet as the interface is still in flux. But you can see it working in the updates section of the site.