After the most important basic settings have been made, the actual construction of the photo archive begins by adding photo folders from the hard disk in Excire Foto to the database.
To do this, click on the "+Add" button in the left column of the screen and select a directory. This can be directly added to the database with all its subfolders. The photos are not only added, but also analyzed and automatically tagged with the help of artificial intelligence (AI).
This process may take some time, but only once. For large photo collections, it can make sense to let the process run overnight.
We also recommend running a test with a smaller set of photos first to get a feel for how long it takes to load and analyze the photos. This is highly dependent on the speed of the system used consisting of computer hardware and hard drives, as well as their connection. Photos can also be added from external hard drives or data servers on the network (NAS systems).
When adding photos to the database, the original files remain unchanged in their location.
Excire Foto creates reduced preview files in the database, so that the photo archive can be searched and displayed even when external hard drives are not currently connected.
The progress of the import process is indicated by a progress bar. If you click on this bar, more details are displayed, and it is possible to cancel the process prematurely. Data that has already been collected is retained, so that you can continue adding and analyzing it later.