Automatic tagging during analysis
Every photo Kestrel analyzes gets a species tag and a family tag. No manual tagging, no keyword setup. Load your folders, start the analysis, and let Kestrel work in the background.
Species Search
Every bird you've ever photographed, one search away.
Kestrel automatically classifies every detected bird by species and family. Search your entire photo library — across all your folders, all your outings, all your years of shooting — by what you photographed, not when.
Type any species or family name — results surface instantly from across your entire library.
To be clear: Accuracy isn't perfect
A useful starting point — not a definitive ID.
More reliable
Family-level search
Searching by family — warblers, raptors, shorebirds, sparrows — is fairly reliable and a good primary tool for narrowing your library.
Useful starting point
Species-level search
Species-level classification is useful for narrowing searches, but treat results as a starting point, not a definitive ID. The improvement over folder-by-folder browsing is dramatic even with occasional misclassifications.
Current limitation
North American birds only
Kestrel currently supports North American bird species. International support and improved species accuracy are planned for future releases.
If you can't find what you're looking for, try searching by family instead of species, or lower the confidence threshold to surface more results.
The problem it solves
Folder structures eventually break down.
"Backyard April," "Spring Migration 2023," "Road Trip Birds" — none of these are searchable by species. The lifer from two years ago is in there somewhere. You know you got a great shot of it. But where?
Kestrel makes it findable. Every photo it analyzes gets a species tag and a family tag — silently, automatically, while you sleep. Your library becomes searchable not just by date and folder, but by what's in the frame.
Sounds familiar?
- You remember a great shot of a lifer from two years ago — but not the folder it's in.
- You're heading somewhere new and want to review all your old shots of the target species first.
- You want to check if you've ever photographed a particular bird before.
- Years of outings are split across dozens of folders — browsing all of them manually isn't an option.
How it works
Tag once. Search forever.
Cross-library search
Load your full library into Kestrel — multiple folders, multiple years — and type a name. Results surface instantly from across everything Kestrel has analyzed, regardless of how your folders are organized.
Confidence threshold slider
A confidence slider lets you tune your results. Lower it to cast a wide net and see everything Kestrel tagged. Raise it to see only higher-confidence matches. The right setting depends on how common the species is in your library.
Your best bird photos are already in there.
Kestrel finds them. Free, open-source, and 100% local — your library never leaves your computer.