Photoreka Journal
Notes on AI & photography
Technical write-ups and field notes on curation, computer vision, and what it actually takes to make sense of a photographic body of work.
Ask Photos vs Photoreka ChatLab: Chat With Your Photo Library
Google's Ask Photos lets you talk to your camera roll in plain language. Photoreka's ChatLab lets you talk to a curated body of work. They share a verb and almost nothing else. An honest comparison of what each one knows about your photos, the questions each can answer, and when to use both.
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Can AI Review a Photography Portfolio? What It Sees and What It Misses
Photographers are pasting their work into chatbots and asking for a portfolio review. An honest look at what AI can judge from a few uploaded frames, where it falls short, how to brief it well, and what changes when the AI can read your whole body of work.
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How to Add GPS Location to Photos Already Taken (Even Without a GPS Camera)
Your camera never recorded where you were, and now your archive is a map with no pins. Four ways to geotag photos after the fact — a GPS track, a map and your memory, a visual search, or AI that reads the place from the picture — and how to choose between them.
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How to Find Your Photography Style (It's Already in Your Archive)
Every guide gives the same advice: look back at your work and notice what you repeat. Almost none explains how to do that with 20,000 photos. A practical method to find, describe and develop your photography style from the photos you've already taken.
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How to Add White Borders to Instagram Photos — in Bulk and Without Cropping
You framed a landscape in 3:2 and Instagram wants to cut the sides off. A white border keeps the whole photo and makes every post in a carousel the same shape. Which canvas size to pick, the ways to add borders, and how to frame a whole batch at once for free.
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Culling Is Not Editing: Why Your Body of Work Needs a Different Kind of AI
AI culling tools are brilliant at one job: getting a shoot from thousands of frames to the keepers. Then a different job begins — deciding which photographs matter and in what order. Why those are two jobs, why they need different tools, and why Photoreka is built mainly for the second one.
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How to Sequence Photos: A Practical Method for Series, Photobooks and Portfolios
Two photographers can choose the same twenty photographs and make two different pieces of work. The difference is the order. A step-by-step method to sequence a photo series, a photobook or a portfolio: openers and closers, pairs, rhythm, coherence, and how to test it.
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AI Photo Raters Compared: The Best Ways to Rate and Rank Your Photos in 2026
Type 'rate my photo' into a search engine and you get dating-profile graders, camera-roll apps, wedding-culling software and research papers. They answer three very different questions. An honest guide to which AI photo rater or photo ranker fits yours.
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Best AI Culling Software in 2026: Aftershoot, Narrative Select, FilterPixel, Imagen and Photoreka Compared
AI culling has turned an evening of rejecting frames into a coffee break. An honest look at Aftershoot, Narrative Select, FilterPixel and Imagen — what each does best, where each stops — and where Photoreka fits, which is not where you might expect.
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The Best AI Photo Organizers for Photographers in 2026
Excire Foto, Peakto, Mylio, Lightroom, Google Photos, digiKam, Immich, PhotoPrism and Photoreka all call themselves AI photo organizers — and they solve different problems. An honest guide to what each one actually does, where it stops, and who it's for.
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Lightroom Classic AI Search: Excire Search vs Photoreka Compared
Lightroom Classic still can't find a photo you never keyworded, and Adobe's natural-language search only lives in the cloud-based Lightroom app. Two plugins fill the gap: Excire Search and Photoreka. An honest look at what each one does inside Classic — and where each one stops.
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How to Choose Which Photos to Enter in a Photography Contest
Most contest entries don't lose because they are bad photos. They lose because they were the wrong photos to send. A practical way to shortlist like a jury: read the brief first, pass the first-glance test, and get a critique instead of a vote.
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How to Pick Your Best Photos from Hundreds of Shots
You came back with 800 photos and you know there are ten great ones in there. A practical editing workflow to find them: separate culling from selecting, let the photos cool down, compare like with like, and choose with criteria instead of memories.
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PhotoPrism vs Photoreka: Self-Hosting Your Archive vs. Making Sense of It
PhotoPrism is the best self-hosted photo library you can run: open source, browser-based, AI labels, face recognition, your hardware, your rules. It solves ownership beautifully. An honest look at why that still leaves the harder problem untouched.
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digiKam vs Photoreka: Free Local Cataloging, or AI Curation on Top of It?
digiKam is free, open source, cross-platform, and after twenty years it's probably the most capable photo database a photographer can install without paying anything. So why would you add Photoreka? An honest comparison of what tags can do — and where they stop.
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ChatLab: A Conversation with Your Entire Photo Archive
We wanted to talk to an entire catalog—not just a single photo—and we couldn't find anything that could do it. That's how ChatLab was born: an agent built on frontier models that knows your archive, actually sees your photos, and orchestrates the rest of Photoreka's tools.
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Looking for Peakto on Windows? Photoreka vs Peakto for AI Photo Curation
Peakto is one of the most interesting AI photo organizers of the last few years — and it's Mac-only, subscription-priced. An honest comparison for photographers who want AI-powered organization and curation on Windows, Linux, or simply without a monthly fee.
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Your Catalog Is a Universe, Not a Grid: The Case for the 2D/3D Atlas
Grids and folders show you fifty photos at a time, ordered by filename. Your catalog isn't a list — it has shape, density, and gaps that no scrollbar can reveal. On why nothing else renders an entire archive as a navigable space, and what happens when you finally see your work from the outside.
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