Face recognition for Lightroom Classic: $19.99 vs $199 vs $270

By David · July 2, 2026 · 9 min read

Full disclosure before anything else: I build Face Tagger, one of the three tools in this comparison. I'm biased, and pretending otherwise would be silly. What I can do is get the facts about all three right, tell you honestly where the other two are better, and let the prices argue for themselves.

What you're actually shopping for

"Face recognition for Lightroom" hides three different problems, and the right purchase depends on which one is yours:

• "Who is in this photo?" You want every shot of your daughter, or of the bride, findable by name. The output you need is keywords in your Lightroom catalog.
• "Tag and cull everything for me." Faces are one part of a bigger wish: autotagging scenes and objects, checking focus, picking the sharpest frame from a burst, maybe tagging video too.
• "My library is scattered across five apps." Lightroom, Apple Photos, Capture One, folders of exports. You want one search box over all of it, and faces are one of the things it should understand.

Each of the three tools was built for exactly one of these. That's why the prices differ by an order of magnitude, and it's why "which is best" is the wrong question. Here's the honest map.

The three tools at a glance

Excire Search 2026: the do-everything plugin ($199)

Excire Search 2026 is the established name here, and it earns the reputation. It shipped in September 2025 at $199 for a full license, runs on both Mac and Windows, and processes everything on your machine.

Face recognition is one feature in a long list. You can search for people by picking an example photo, filter faces by age or gender or how many people are in the frame, and have the results written into your Lightroom catalog as keywords. Around that sit the features that actually justify the price: automatic keywording of your whole library, free-text prompt search, AI-assisted culling with face and eye sharpness detection (green label for sharp faces, red for soft), a duplicate finder, and keywording for video clips.

Two practical notes from the spec sheet that reviews tend to skip. First, it wants resources: 8 GB RAM minimum, 16 GB recommended for big catalogs, and roughly 800 MB of index storage per 100,000 images. Second, upgrades between major versions are paid ($69 from the 2024 version, $99 from 2022), so "one-time" means one-time per generation.

Buy Excire if faces are just one item on your wishlist and you'd use the culling, autotagging, or video search weekly. For a working wedding or event photographer on Windows, it's realistically the only option in this list anyway. If you're weighing it against Adobe's own tools, I've written about what Lightroom Classic's built-in AI culling can and can't do.

Peakto: the library hub that happens to tag faces ($270)

Peakto, from the French company CYME, is a different kind of product. It's not a Lightroom plugin; it's a native Mac app that indexes your Lightroom catalog, Apple Photos library, Capture One sessions, and plain folders, then gives you one search box over all of it.

Its face tagging is genuinely nice: the AI groups matching faces across your whole indexed universe, you name a cluster once, and it tags every match in one shot. Analysis runs entirely on your Mac. It also reads the face tags you already made in Lightroom or Apple Photos, so you don't start from zero.

The catch is directional: Peakto pulls tags in, it doesn't push keywords back into your Lightroom catalog. The names live in Peakto's own database, because the product's whole point is being the layer above your apps. If your goal is Smart Collections in Lightroom Classic keyed to people's names, that's not what this buys you. Pricing reflects the bigger ambition too: the Standard lifetime license is $270 (including one year of major updates), or subscriptions from around $9.99 a month. CYME also sells a separate Peakto Search plugin for Lightroom Classic at $129, but note that one is semantic search only - the face recognition lives in the main app.

Buy Peakto if your photos are genuinely scattered across multiple apps and the "one search over everything" idea makes your shoulders drop with relief. Mac only.

Face Tagger: just the people part, done cheap ($19.99)

This is mine, so judge accordingly. I built Face Tagger because I wanted one thing Lightroom Classic wouldn't give me: type my kid's name into the Library filter and see every photo of her, including the ones where she's facing away from the camera.

The workflow is deliberately narrow. You pick a handful of reference photos of a person and train the plugin on them - about five minutes. It then scans your catalog locally and tags every other shot of that person as a real Lightroom keyword. Because the model considers more than the face itself, it catches people in profile, from behind, or half out of frame, which is exactly where Lightroom's own People View gives up. There's also a Suggest People mode that clusters unknown faces and proposes groupings, so you can name people you haven't trained.

The honest limits: it does nothing except people (no scene tagging, no culling, no video), and v1 ships for Apple Silicon Macs only - no Intel, no Windows yet. First run downloads about 500 MB of AI models, and after that it's fully offline. Everything lands as ordinary keywords, so Smart Collections, filters, and exports just work, and the tags survive independently of the plugin. If you use XMP sidecars, the names even travel with your RAW files.

Buy Face Tagger if the only sentence you care about is "find every photo of this person, as a keyword, in Lightroom Classic" and you're on an M-series Mac. It's a tenth of Excire's price because it does a tenth of Excire's feature list - the one tenth this post is about.

Which one should you buy?

Here's the decision as I'd give it to a friend over coffee:

And one more option that costs nothing: Lightroom Classic's own People View. It exists, it's free, and for a few thousand photos it can be enough. It's also slow on large catalogs, demands a lot of confirmation clicking, and has a well-documented habit of quietly stalling - I wrote a whole post on why Lightroom Classic face recognition stops working and how to kick it back to life. Try it before you spend money. If it frustrates you, you'll know precisely which of the three problems above is yours.

The part nobody puts in the comparison table

All three tools process faces on your own machine. No uploads, no cloud face database, no terms-of-service change two years from now deciding your family photos are training data. In 2026, when most "AI photo" products are thin wrappers around a cloud API, all three companies independently decided local processing was the only acceptable design for face data. Whatever you buy from this list, you're not trading your archive's privacy for search convenience.

The real difference is philosophy. Excire believes you want a Swiss Army knife inside Lightroom. Peakto believes Lightroom is one drawer in a bigger cabinet. Face Tagger believes you want one sharp blade and $180 left in your pocket. All three are right - for different people.

FAQ

Does Lightroom Classic have built-in face recognition?

Yes. People View has been in Lightroom Classic for years, and it's free. It's also slow on large catalogs, needs a lot of manual confirmation, and has a habit of silently stalling - which is why the plugin market exists. If your catalog is small and you have patience, try it first.

Do any of these tools upload my photos to the cloud?

No. All three - Excire Search 2026, Peakto, and Face Tagger - run their face recognition locally on your machine. None of them send your photos or face data to a server. That's rare in 2026 and worth appreciating.

Which face recognition tools work on Windows?

Only Excire Search 2026 (Windows 10 64-bit or Windows 11). Peakto is a native Mac app with no Windows version. Face Tagger currently ships for Apple Silicon Macs (M1 or later) only.

Where do the people tags actually end up?

Excire and Face Tagger both write real Lightroom keywords into your catalog, so the names work in Smart Collections, the Library filter bar, and exports. Peakto keeps tags in its own catalog and imports existing face tags from Lightroom; its purpose is searching across apps, not writing back into Lightroom's keyword list.

Is Face Tagger's $19.99 price a subscription?

No, it's a one-time purchase with a license key. Excire Search 2026 is also one-time ($199, with paid upgrades between major versions). Peakto offers both subscriptions (from around $9.99 a month) and a lifetime license ($270 for the Standard tier, which includes one year of major updates).