The most significant update to Project Kestrel to date. Kestrel is up to 500% faster while achieving better analysis quality, and now supports more than 1,200 wildlife species in addition to birds.
Major Changes
- New analysis pipeline (v2.0) delivers up to 500% performance improvement over v(Kentucky Warbler) while improving bird detection sensitivity and exposure compensation performance.
- New wildlife detection model powered by MegaDetector delivers significant improvements in detection sensitivity across animal types.
- New wildlife species classifier powered by SpeciesNet enables identification of up to 1,200 wildlife species.
- New image segmentation model powered by SAM-HQ substantially improves identification of specific bird pixels.
- ONNX Runtime migration of all models (including the existing quality classifier) enables GPU utilization and delivers substantial performance improvements on all systems.
- New exposure compensation algorithm performs 10× faster than v(Kentucky Warbler) and significantly better on poorly-lit bird images.
- New parallel file processing (configurable in Settings) delivers up to 3× performance improvement in RAW decode speed.
- The new pipeline is faster and more accurate. Huge thanks to the teams behind MegaDetector, SpeciesNet, and SAM-HQ for their incredible open-source work.
- Large number of user interface tweaks make Kestrel more intuitive:
- All analysis-specific settings have been moved into the Analyze Folders dialog for clarity and proximity.
- Improved timeline visualization no longer strictly groups photos by the hour. A new "Adjust Capture Time" dialog lets you correct your camera's capture time (e.g., Daylight Savings Time).
- Exposure compensation is now applied to image thumbnails (toggleable in Settings), making it easier to view image details across lighting conditions.
- New ability to see the bird thumbnail side-by-side while browsing your photos.
- Scene view additions: "Mark as Reviewed" button, "Open in [photo editor]" button, and dedicated buttons to switch subjects in multi-subject scenes.
- Revamped in-app tutorials with separate Basic and Advanced branches, plus a rotating welcome-panel tips carousel for ongoing feature discovery.
Minor Changes
- Updated Privacy Policy and Terms of Use to clarify that some file names may be transmitted when reporting bugs or crashes.
- Several bug fixes:
- Fixed a bug where the tutorial would keep popping up for some users who upgraded their version of Kestrel.
- Fixed a bug where Kestrel would erroneously believe it had crashed, prompting the user to send a crash report.
- Fixed a bug where images would appear "split in half" when viewed rapidly.
- Fixed a bug causing user-specified culling decisions and similar edits to be overwritten if Kestrel was still analyzing the folder during review.
- Fixed bugs causing some scenes to appear hazy or tinted on certain camera models.
- Thank you to the MegaDetector, SpeciesNet, and SAM-HQ teams for their open-source contributions!
Feedback? Please visit projectkestrel.org/contact or use the in-app feedback feature!