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 yesterday at 06:14 PM1 day 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.

I'm really interested to betatest your plugin.
Most of my uw photography collection is from Mediterranean dives.

I would be interested in this except for the fact I don't use Lightroom, I have Capture one pro.

I’d happily give it a go. I’ve got around 40k images in LR. Most fish, especially those from the Tropical Western Atlantic (ie Caribbean) plus Bermuda are IDd and keyworded so I can compare results.

I'm ready with a lot of photos from 12 year diving and I'm using LR

I started year ago with tagging the species... but I stopped it took to many time...

I'm an IT developer

12 hours ago, Brettjforsyth said:

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

I've been working on something similar in an app I have in development. I am using CLIP image embeddings from iNaturlalist as part of my RAG. Has LR Classic Plugin and Adobe CC integrations as well. Would be interested in sharing ideas. You can sign up for a preview at https://critterdive.com/signup

I'd be interested in testing it. I'm a new underwater photographer with ~1000 species images from the Caribbean so far. I've been disappointed in the AI solutions I've tried (Google and iNaturalist-based) because of hallucination or no ID, and they don't work in Lightroom. The best I've found so far is manually using sources like Caribbean Reef Life or Google images, but that requires having a clue what the critter is before identifying it (how do you look up how to spell a word in the dictionary if you don't know how it's spelled?). Plus it takes a lot of time.

Sent an IM.

Edited 11 hours ago11 hr by ACHiPo

Hi All,

Excited so many are willing to give it a go. Signup on the site and I’ll get you in the queue. It’s a limited beta so be specific about what you have and if you’re going to be able to verify results.

https://www.nomenapp.com

brett

Edited 5 hours ago5 hr by Brettjforsyth

54 minutes ago, Brettjforsyth said:

Hi All,

Excited so many are willing to give it a go. Signup on the site and I’ll get you in the queue. It’s a limited beta so be specific about what you have and if you’re going to be able to verify results.

https://www.nomenapp.com

brett

Page not found

your link is not good
this is better
Nomen — AI Species Identification for Lightroom Classic

58 minutes ago, Brettjforsyth said:

. It’s a limited beta so be specific about what you have and if you’re going to be able to verify results.

What do you mean with be specific?
I have more or less 70000 underwater photos (raws)
A part in Mediteraneen, Caraibic Asia, Seychelles/Maldives a large type of species..

Thanks CaolIla fixed the link as well editor screwed it up when I posted.

That's all I need to know about the types of photos but I do want to know if you are able to ID a lot of what you have already but putting in keywords was just to much of a pain so you stopped like I did. In the beta I am looking to obviously fix any bugs I encounter but I also want to see where the matching breaks down and why. For example the other day I had to rework the bird system because it wasn't handling sub species splits well and because I know my bird ID it was obvious to me.

Added my name to the list. I dialled right back on keywording as i felt it to be a right pain in LR. Struggled with hierarchies, and i find it far too easy to accidentally add the first one to more photos because of auto suggestion. Reasonably confident with iD skills, but the recent reclassification of many species (nudis) and synonyms might be an interesting challenge to see how Nomen copes.

Got a lot of photos from Indo, Red Sea, Caribbean and P'pines.

I am a Biologist and willing to test. However, as others already stated, I am worried about my catalogue. Does the plugin automatically write the data or just after approving a suggestion from the app? I would strongly prefer a standalone app which I can use for my developed files only. They are easy to restore. Just in case…

The text on your website which is located on the right hand side of the page (black background) is unreadable (cut on the right side).

Regards,

Jens

Edited 53 minutes ago53 min by Jens H