Automatic bird detection
Finds birds, masks them precisely, and focuses quality scoring on the subject.
Organize Your Bird Photography with AI
Find your sharpest bird photos faster.
Project Kestrel uses machine learning to organize your bird photo collection. By grouping similar photos together, ranking them by sharpness, and tagging them by bird species, Kestrel turns your photography into a searchable, quality-sorted, and interactive library.
- Sort by sharpness to skip hours of tedious manual culling.
- Instantly search all your photography work by bird species or family.
- Double-click on any photo to open in your favorite editor.
Kestrel is completely free, open-source, and runs locally on your computer.
Kestrel turns your photo collection into a searchable, quality-sorted library. Browse by scene or family
to quickly find your best shots without pixel peeping.
Works seamlessly with your workflow
Adobe Lightroom
Darktable
Capture One
Star Ratings Sync Automatically
100% Local & Private
All processing is done on your device. Your photos never leave your computer.Image Quality Ranking
Kestrel ranks photos by sharpness, blur, and noise, letting the sharpest photos surface to the top.XMP Metadata Sync
Ratings and tags sync instantly with Lightroom and other professional editors.Burst Grouping
Automatically group similar frames to compare and find the perfect moment.RAW Format Support
Works with CR2, CR3, NEF, ARW, DNG, and most other professional RAW formats.You Stay in Control
Kestrel identifies the sharpest files, but you make the final artistic decisions.Features
Make reviewing thousands of photos feel effortless.
Family and species search
Classifies birds so you can filter your library by family or species.
Objective quality ranking
Only considers sharpness, motion blur, and noise so you can quickly select which photos you want to edit.
Scene grouping
Bursts are grouped automatically so you can judge similar frames together.
Note: Kestrel family classification and species classification may be inaccurate and should only be used as a tool to help narrow down your library when searching for a specific scene.
Quick Start
Get up and running in five quick steps.
Ready to try it?
Download Project Kestrel
Windows and macOS builds are available on GitHub. Linux users can run from source with Python 3.12+ and ImageMagick.