While my overall picture library isn’t huge, it is split between raw files edited in DxO PhotoLab, Apple Photos and a directory structure of legacy JPEGs taken with various digital cameras over the last 25 years. So, finding pictures or specific subjects is a bit of a challenge.

This is not a full review – I was intrigued enough by Peakto to do a free trial (which, for some reason, they make a lot harder than it should be). So, here are my findings after a couple of days…

First, the good:

  • The search capabilities are very nice, especially considering that it is searching multiple distinct catalogs or file systems. I don’t quite yet understand how much it derives from image analysis and how much keyword tags contribute to the search, but I do enjoy it.
  • Performance (ingestion, analysis, searching, etc.) is generally very good. My M1 Pro MacBook Pro is pretty fast, but it also isn’t the hottest machine learning hardware on the market, either.
  • The face recognition is impressive – it will identify faces even in the background of pictures and is generally fast.
  • Once you get used to the UI paradigm, it is quite productive.
  • It has some interesting support for video, with automated audio transcription, but I haven’t really played much with it.

Now, the bad:

  • The onboarding experience could be improved. A lot. I wish I had known to start by playing with the demo content then removing it (there is a setting for that) before trying to ingest my own pictures. The ingestion paradigm for the various different sources varies per source kind, so my own assumptions led me astray for a while.
  • There are some rather annoying UI bugs – none fatal – that detract from the experience. The most annoying is the way the keyword tag editor has keyboard focus problems that make typing tags a lot harder than it should be. The grid view refreshes itself needlessly when applying edits in the background. It is by no means bad, but the niggles are annoying.
  • The AI “analysis” feature seems questionable. Maybe I’m missing the point, but its aesthetic and technical rankings seem poorly correlated with my taste.
  • Sometimes, the DxO PhotoLab support seems to fail to pick up the post-edit thumbnail from PhotoLab. When the editing is significant, that can be quite frustrating.

Some things that could be improved:

  • The keyword tagging support is relatively limited. I didn’t see a way to edit hierarchical keywords, tags are case-sensitive but the application insists on one casing convention even when the existing tags in the library follow another and, finally, there is no global management of tags.
  • The face recognition is just that – it recognizes faces but does not let you tell the application where it missed some. There are some scenarios (rotation) where it is less effective at detecting faces and it would be really nice to tell it what it missed.
  • Related to the above, face recognition and keyword tagging are distinct features that don’t link to each other. This is annoying when the underlying application (e.g., DxO PhotoLab) understands tags, but not faces – being able to create tags based on faces would help when searching in PhotoLab.
  • Similarly AI-generated tags and tags manually associated with the images live in parallel worlds. You can use both, but combining them is clumsy.
  • Scrolling performance in the grid view could be smoother – especially when scrolling slowly (thus, the next pictures to show are known in advance).
  • As far as I can tell, some trivial image file metadata edits like rotation are missing. Working with directories of random legacy digital camera files is needlessly painful when you can’t even rotate the image orientation without jumping into another application.
  • Using YouTube as the onboarding documentation is weird. The videos are nice enough, but they aren’t that numerous or slickly produced to justify the emphasis.
  • Burying the free trial options so that people start a subscription to try the software may improve the conversion rate, but it sure isn’t a welcoming sign or a sign of confidence. As far as I can tell, you can try the software without starting a subscription, they just obfuscate it on their website. To be honest, I can’t tell whether it is a dark pattern of just bad web design, but it did make me think twice before trying Peakto.

Overall, I like the application and I find it to be a good step towards better management of my picture library. It’s pretty obvious that it is a niche product by a small company, so I understand that the polish and pricing can’t be as good as for a mass-market product, but this gets a job done that the big players aren’t tackling. So, Peakto definitely has a place.

In the context of DxO PhotoLab, I would rather that DxO put all their effort into the photo editing features if I could use Peakto for library metadata management and searching. There could be a pretty good synergy there.