Updated September 2026 · Comparisons
Excire Foto vs FolioSort
The Excire Foto alternative we recommend is FolioSort: it does the same on-device AI keywording and search on Mac and Windows, and it also files your photos into folders by their real date, repairs Google Takeout exports and keeps verified backups — for €29.99 once with Elite, against €229 for Excire Foto 2027.
Excire Foto is a mature AI catalog: automatic keywords, prompt search, faces, text in images and aesthetic ratings, all inside its own collections. FolioSort writes its AI keywords into the files themselves and shows the whole library — timeline, map, people, events — over the folders the photos are already in, with nothing imported.
Written by FolioSort — it is our product. Excire's facts were checked on Excire's own site in September 2026; nobody paid to be listed.
Both run their AI locally — FolioSort writes it into your files and also puts the files themselves in order
| Feature | Excire Foto | FolioSort |
|---|---|---|
| Platform | macOS & Windows | macOS 14+ & Windows 10+ — one Elite licence covers 3 devices across both |
| On-device AI (no cloud upload) | ||
| AI keywording | Automatic keywording, its core strength | AI Tags: 303-tag vocabulary, reviewed, written into XMP/IPTC (Elite) |
| Plain-language search | Prompt search: content, faces, scenes, text | AI Photo Search, text in photos, file names — 62 ms at 100,000 photos |
| Face recognition | Find a Person + People (Elite) | |
| Duplicates & similar photos | Exact and similar, photos & video | |
| Aesthetic & sharpness ratings | No aesthetic score — Best Shots compares the frames of one burst (sharpness, faces, open eyes) to suggest the keeper (Elite) | |
| Where the library lives | Its own collections over your folders | Your folders — a Library view (timeline, map, people, events) with nothing imported |
| Sort files into folders by real date | Organizes inside its collections | {YYYY}/{MM}/{City} on disk, with live preview |
| Google Photos Takeout repair | Restores dates & GPS from JSON — free, unlimited | |
| Verified backups & corruption checks | Protect: hash-verified Backup Copy + Archive Health (Pro) | |
| Lightroom Classic | Excire Search 2026 plugin, €199 separately | Not a plugin — Lightroom reads FolioSort's keywords from the files |
| Pricing | €229 one-time (Excire Foto 2027) | Free tier · Pro €19.99 · Elite €29.99, once |
Excire Foto 2027 and Excire Search 2026 as described on Excire's site, September 2026. FolioSort 5: AI Tags, AI Photo Search, Find a Person and People are Elite; Backup Copy and Archive Health are Pro; the Library and Takeout repair are free.
What FolioSort does beyond keywording and search
AI Tags proposes keywords from a fixed 303-tag vocabulary in 12 categories and shows them as photo cards to review — Strict, Balanced or Generous, up to 8 per photo. Accepted tags go into XMP dc:subject, Lightroom's hierarchical keywords and IPTC Keywords, or an .xmp sidecar for RAW, so any app that reads XMP sees them. Nothing of yours is removed, and Undo takes back exactly what was added.
FolioSort opens on a Library that shows every photo and video on the drives you add as a timeline, a map, people and events, with an "On this day" band and a health panel. Nothing is imported: the index is a disposable cache, rebuilt from the folders if deleted, and unplugged drives stay as greyed tiles until they come back. Browsing is free and unlimited.
Excire organizes photos inside its own collections. FolioSort can also put the files themselves in order: it copies or moves them into a {YYYY}/{MM}/{City} structure built from the EXIF capture date, with a live preview of the folder tree first. Every transfer is checksum-verified and the last 50 batches can be undone; the result is folders you can open in any Finder or Explorer window.
Backup Copy mirrors the library to another drive with the same folders, re-reads every copied file and compares its hash (XXHash64 or SHA-256), and never deletes anything on the backup. Archive Health later reports each file as intact, modified, corrupted, missing or new, and restores damaged files from the verified copy.
Coming from Google Photos? FolioSort reads the JSON sidecars in a Takeout export and writes the real capture dates and GPS back into each file's EXIF, offline — free and unlimited on every tier. Excire does not offer a Takeout repair.
Find a Person gathers every photo of someone from one to three reference photos, and People groups faces automatically with no reference at all — on the Apple Neural Engine on macOS and local ONNX models on Windows. Nothing leaves your computer, just as with Excire.
FolioSort finds exact copies and visually similar ones — resized, re-compressed, lightly edited — across photos and videos. Only byte-identical copies are pre-selected, and removals go to the Trash or Recycle Bin. Merging drives keeps the best copy by a fixed rule: RAW over JPEG, then resolution, size, original over edited.
Excire Foto 2027 is €229 one-time, with the Lightroom plugin €199 on top. FolioSort Elite, with all the on-device AI, is €29.99 once for 3 devices across Mac and Windows; Pro is €19.99 for one computer, and the free tier handles 100 files per batch. FolioSort 5 is a free update for everyone who already bought.
Yes. FolioSort does the same kind of on-device AI work as Excire Foto on Mac and Windows — keywords proposed by a local model, plain-language search, face recognition, text in photos, duplicates — and costs €29.99 once with Elite instead of €229. It also does what Excire does not: it files the photos into folders by their real capture date, repairs Google Takeout exports, keeps hash-verified backups, and shows the whole library as a timeline, map, people and events over your own folders.
Yes. AI Tags proposes keywords from a fixed vocabulary of 303 tags in 12 categories, using the on-device AI index, and shows them as photo cards to review before anything is written. It writes up to 8 tags per photo into XMP dc:subject, Lightroom's hierarchical keywords and, for JPEG and TIFF, IPTC Keywords; proprietary RAW files get an .xmp sidecar. Tags are added next to your own keywords and Undo removes exactly what FolioSort added. Writing tags is part of Elite; Free and Pro can tag 20 photos.
Excire Foto 2027 costs €229 one-time, and the Lightroom Classic plugin, Excire Search 2026, is sold separately for €199. FolioSort has a free tier, Pro at €19.99 once for 1 computer, and Elite at €29.99 once for 3 devices across Mac and Windows. The AI features — AI Tags, whole-library AI search, Find a Person and People — are in Elite. FolioSort 5 is a free update for everyone who already bought Pro or Elite, and there is a 14-day refund with no conditions.
No. Excire Foto organizes photos inside its own collections and does not sort the files into date folders. FolioSort's Organizer does: choose a template such as year, month and city, check the live preview of the folder tree, and it copies or moves every photo and video into folders named from its EXIF capture date. Copy is the default, every transfer is checksum-verified, and the last 50 batches can be undone.
When you want a mature AI catalog and are happy to work inside its collections. Excire Foto rates photos for aesthetics and sharpness; FolioSort has no aesthetic score, and its Best Shots only compares the frames of one burst — sharpness, faces, open eyes — to suggest the keeper. And if you do all your work in Lightroom Classic, Excire Search 2026 puts that search inside Lightroom as a plugin (€199). FolioSort is not a Lightroom plugin; Lightroom reads the keywords FolioSort writes with Metadata › Read Metadata from Files.
No. FolioSort shows your folders; it doesn't import them. Its index is a disposable cache of the folders you add, rebuilt from them if it is deleted, and nothing — no album, rating or keyword — lives only there, because everything FolioSort changes is written into the files or into .xmp sidecars. Browsing the Library is free and unlimited on every tier.
Yes. FolioSort is a native app for macOS 14 or later and Windows 10 or later, and one Elite licence covers 3 devices across Mac and Windows. The AI runs locally on both, and keywords written on one computer are in the files for the other. It does not run on Linux, phones or the web.
No. AI search, AI Tags, face recognition and text reading run on the computer — Apple Vision and Core ML on the Neural Engine on macOS, local ONNX models on Windows — and no photo, face, file name or path is ever sent. The only network calls are GPS coordinates when you ask for place names, map tiles when the Library map is open, an update check, licence activation once, and anonymous usage events.
AI keywords and search, faces, dated folders, Takeout repair and verified backups — on Mac and Windows, on your own folders. Download FolioSort free.