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.
Try it
Search a real tagged library.
156 photos from a season of outings, tagged automatically by Kestrel. Search by species or family, and tune the confidence threshold to widen or narrow your results.
To be clear: Accuracy isn't perfect
A useful starting point — not a definitive ID.
Family-level search
Searching by family — warblers, raptors, shorebirds, sparrows — is fairly reliable and a good primary tool for narrowing your library.
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.
Automatic ID is North American
The automatic classifier currently covers North American species. But manual tagging isn't limited — you can label any bird on Earth yourself (see below). Wider automatic coverage is 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.
Tag anything
Auto-tagging gets you started. You finish the job.
Kestrel's automatic ID covers North America — but manual tagging doesn't stop at any border. Smart autocomplete and keyboard shortcuts let you label any bird on Earth yourself, in seconds.
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Autocomplete that knows its birds
Start typing a name, a four-letter banding code, or the scientific name — Kestrel narrows to the right species as you go, so you're never hunting through a list.
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Keyboard-first tagging
Arrow keys, enter, and shortcuts let you rate and tag your way through a whole import without reaching for the mouse.
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Every species, worldwide
The automatic classifier is North American, but the manual catalog spans the globe — so no matter where you shoot, nothing in your library is untaggable.
Five minutes double-checking and indexing a big import buys you a library you can search by species — next week, or years from now.
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.
Your best bird photos are already in there.
Kestrel finds them. Free and open source — your library never leaves your computer.