01
Organize your outing into scenes.
Automatically groups bursts into logical scenes, sorted chronologically. Review hours of shooting in minutes.
Built for Bird Photographers
Come home after birding and actually enjoy the review.
Project Kestrel groups your bursts into scenes, sorts every frame by sharpness, and tags birds by species — so reviewing feels like reliving the outing, not doing chores.
Free & open source
Photos never leave your computer
Star ratings sync with Lightroom & more
What Kestrel gives you
Powerful analysis, simplified workflow.
02
Sharpness scores every frame.
Photos automatically sorted by sharpness, motion blur, and focus. The best shot from each burst is always on top.
03
Cull with confidence.
Pre-sort your photos by quality rules, accept/reject with one click, and move rejections to a separate folder.
Learn about culling →04
Search by bird species.
Every photo tagged by species and family. Find any bird from any outing across your entire library in seconds.
Learn about species search →Your workflow
Kestrel fits into how you already work.
Choose the workflow that makes sense for you.
Shoot
→
Kestrel analyzes
🔗 Groups scenes
🐦 Finds birds
⭐ Scores sharpness
🏷️ Tags species
→
Export Ratings to Editor
Stars in Lightroom, Darktable & more
Culling Assistant
Sorts by your quality rules
→
Accepts
→
Import into Editor
Rejects
→
Archive or Delete
Browse & pick
Choose your favorites
→
Export Ratings to Editor
Just your selections
Works with your workflow
Kestrel runs before your photo editor, not instead of it.
When you're done reviewing, one click writes all your decisions as XMP sidecar files. Star ratings, picks, and rejections appear instantly in Lightroom, Darktable, Capture One, and most other professional editors. Don't change your workflow. Just give it wings.
Star ratings sync automatically with
Adobe Lightroom
Darktable
Capture One
Photoshop
and countless others
Download
Download Project Kestrel
Ready to give your bird photography wings? Windows and macOS users can download builds directly. Linux users can run from source on GitHub.
Photos are never deleted
Runs locally. Photos never leave your machine.
Free & open source
Note: Analysis takes ~8 sec/photo. For large outings, this can take some time.
Kestrel is in Beta.
You may find bugs and mistakes. Species accuracy is imperfect — family-level is more reliable than species-level. Feedback makes it better.