Hi everyone,

Disclosure up front: I work with CYME, a French software company building tools for photographers. We’re currently testing Specio, an offline desktop tool / Lightroom Classic workflow that helps identify species in wildlife and underwater photo collections.

I’m posting here because marine identification is exactly where expert feedback matters most. Fish, nudibranchs, crustaceans, corals, juveniles, regional variants — these are the cases where we need real underwater photographers to tell us what works, what fails, and what should never be guessed.

What Specio does:

• analyzes photos locally on your computer, with no cloud upload

• suggests species identifications across batches of images

• lets the photographer review or correct results before applying anything

• adds common names, scientific names and taxonomy as Lightroom keywords

• helps explore a photo archive through the taxonomic tree
  

The goal is not to replace expert knowledge. It’s to make large underwater photo archives easier to identify, search and reuse, while keeping human validation at the center.

We’re looking for a few underwater photographers willing to test the beta on their own images and give honest feedback, especially on marine species accuracy and whether this fits naturally into a Lightroom workflow.

If you’re interested, you can tell us a bit about your workflow and apply here :

https://survey.zohopublic.eu/zs/U3CA15?Source=Forum&ContactOwner=hugo.foulquier@cyme.io

I’d also be very interested in hearing opinions directly in this thread: which marine groups or regions do current ID tools struggle with most?

Which keyword system / taxonomy do you use? For end-user, having two (or more) ”competing” keyword structures could cause quite a mess, so finding acceptable keyword structure feels to me like critical first step.

On 7/29/2026 at 7:33 PM, Jukka-Pekka Salmenkaita said:

Which keyword system / taxonomy do you use? For end-user, having two (or more) ”competing” keyword structures could cause quite a mess, so finding acceptable keyword structure feels to me like critical first step.

That’s a very good point, and something we’re paying a lot of attention to.

Specio uses the standard biological taxonomy — from broader taxonomic ranks down to the species — and can write that information back as hierarchical keywords in Lightroom Classic, together with scientific and common names.

But we completely agree that the keyword structure itself is critical. We don’t want Specio to create a parallel taxonomy that clashes with an existing keyword hierarchy photographers may already have.

This is actually one of the reasons we’re talking to wildlife photographers and naturalists at this stage: we want to understand which structures people already use and how Specio should integrate with them rather than impose another system.

If you already have a taxonomy/keyword structure that works well for you, I’d be very interested to see how you organize it.