We are deeply honored to announce that the latest Excire products—Excire Foto 2025 and Excire Search 2026—have just been named “Best Photo Management Software” at the 2026 Technical Image Press Association (TIPA) World Awards!
For us, this is a huge deal. A TIPA award is one of the highest honors a photography product can receive. For those of us who have spent years in the imaging industry, a TIPA is a signal of absolute quality; it indicates that experts around the world recognize the value of the awarded product.
What Makes the TIPA Awards So Important?
The TIPA World Awards aren’t handed out lightly. Each year, a global panel of imaging experts—representing major photography publications across North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia—evaluate the best gear, software, and services on the market.
As explained on the TIPA website: “TIPA editors judge on quality, performance and value criteria that are very important to the end-user. When you buy a product distinguished with a TIPA Awards logo, you can be sure you are buying the very best.”
So while awards are always nice, this one carries a bit more weight. It’s coming from people who spend their time testing gear and software day in and day out, and who are laser-focused on the user.
What Award Did Excire Win (and Why)?
TIPA awards are given annually to photo and video products in a variety of categories. You can view the full category list here; it includes cameras (e.g., best APS-C camera, best medium format camera, best full frame advanced camera), lenses (e.g., best full frame telephoto prime lens, best full frame wide-angle zoom lens, best macro lens), accessories (e.g., best tripod, best professional photo/video monitor), software (e.g., best photo management software, best expert photo editing software, best RAW processing software), and more.
Excire won for the “best photo management software” category.
The premise of Excire is pretty simple: With AI-powered tools, the software makes it easy to manage even the largest collections of photos and videos. Instead of manually keywording, sorting, culling, and digging through folders, photographers can:
- Search for photos using text descriptions
- View and access photos based on similarity
- Let Excire’s AI do any necessary keywording
- Find people photos automatically with facial recognition
- Remove duplicates and near-duplicate files
- Cull images faster with flexible, AI-powered grouping, ranking, and selection tools
Excire works either as a Lightroom Classic plugin (Excire Search) or as a standalone app (Excire Foto), so you don’t have to change your setup to use it. And everything runs locally, so your images stay on your computer and are never sent to the cloud, even when using the AI features.
Looking Ahead
Winning a TIPA award isn’t the end goal, of course, but it’s a great signal that we’re moving in the right direction.
There’s still plenty that we’re working on behind the scenes, but one thing is clear: This positions Excire as a serious player in the evolution of photo management, especially as AI becomes more central to how photographers organize, search, and refine their work.
(And if you’ve ever spent an afternoon trying to find one photo or organize your image collection, you probably already know why!)
If you’re interested in learning more about the TIPA World Awards or you’d like to see the other category winners, check out the TIPA website.
And if you haven’t yet purchased an Excire license (we use a lifetime model, so no subscriptions!), then check out our standalone version right here, and our Lightroom Classic plugin here.