Questions and honest answers.

Nomen covers 1.3 million+ species across 63 species groups, split the way photographers think about subjects. Butterflies and moths are separate groups. Plants break out into trees and shrubs, wildflowers, grasses, ferns, orchids, cacti and succulents, and others. Fungi get three groups: mushrooms, lichens, and one for other fungi. Marine life has its own groups for corals, sponges, nudibranchs, crustaceans, sharks and rays, and more. All 63 come in one download, and each run searches the groups you tick. Fossils have their own group, with over a thousand extinct species that Nomen can match on photos carrying a GPS location.

So a run never misses a group it should have searched. Species data holds all 63 groups in one download of about 4.5 GB, and Nomen needs all of it before it can match. You still choose what each run searches: tick groups in Run Nomen, pick a preset, or use Quick setup. If a group fails to load during a run, Nomen restarts its matching engine once. If it still fails, Nomen stops before writing any keywords.

A one-sentence way to set up a run: I was in … shooting … and saw lots of … Pick each part from its menu, or type places, what you were shooting and what you saw in any order. Nomen picks the species groups and the country, and shows a preview before anything runs. My photos show picks the scan: one main subject, several subjects, or a flock or school. Tick Leave out people beside it to keep divers and hands from coming back as species. The country applies to photos without GPS; photos with GPS keep their own location. Click Run Nomen to start, or All settings… to see every option first. Give a setup a name to keep it in the Preset menu. On a new install, Quick setup opens by itself the first time you run Nomen. After that, open it from the top of the Run Nomen window.

Every Nomen match says how sure it is: Clear match, Close call (naming the species close behind), or Check this one. Quick review and Full review show it on each match, and the percentage is in Lightroom’s Metadata panel. If you turn on color labels, which are off by default, it’s also written to the photo as green, yellow, or red. Photos whose best match score falls below the confidence threshold (default 0.5) are saved as unmatched: no species keywords, and the caption is cleared. Turn on Ask me when the top two matches are close in settings to check close calls. If a country is set that still has neighbors to search, and the match isn’t a Clear match, Nomen adds an Also search box to the match window for those neighboring countries. In Main subject with only some species groups ticked, Nomen also asks, before review, whether to search all groups for photos with no strong match. A Clear match means no other species came close. It can still be wrong, so review the photos that matter to you.

When your photos contain GPS coordinates, Nomen detects each photo’s country entirely offline and filters out species that don’t occur there, reducing implausible suggestions. The species index covers 248 countries. The countries you tick on the Location tab apply to photos with no GPS, and to photos taken more than about 100 km offshore. Ignore country filter searches every country instead, overriding both. It’s slower and has no rarity ranking or neighbor search, and it stays ticked for your next run. If no country is set and no photo has GPS, Nomen asks before running instead of silently searching the whole world.

Yes. The Every subject mode finds and matches each subject in the frame. In Full review, the Review Matches window lists each subject with its own suggestions. Apply Selected writes the matches you keep. For flocks, reef surveys, and other dense groups, Simple survey and Deep survey detect every individual and give you a count per species.

Simple survey and Deep survey count and match every individual in a scene. Simple survey makes one pass over the whole image at standard resolution: 10 to 30 seconds per photo. Deep survey tiles the image and scans it at up to 8000 pixels on the long edge, taking 1 to 3 minutes per photo. It catches subjects too small or distant for a single pass. Both modes give you per-species counts, rarity tiers when a country is set, an overlay of what Nomen found, and full metadata written to Lightroom. They’re designed for bird flocks, reef surveys, wildlife census work, and other crowded scenes. Counts on distant or small subjects are approximate.

Yes. Aquatic groups cover fish, nudibranchs, corals, sponges, crustaceans, sharks and rays, and more. The Underwater preset selects 16 species groups for underwater work in one step, including Flatworms and Millipedes, the group that holds reef flatworms and bryozoans. Or describe the dive trip in Quick setup. You can quick-select dive regions (Coral Triangle, Red Sea, Caribbean, and others) on the Location tab. The Caribbean region includes Bonaire, Curacao, Aruba and the other dive islands.

No. Nomen never uploads a photo, and you never have to send one to anyone. Matching, subject finding and the GPS lookup all run on your computer. Since Nomen never receives your photos, they can’t be used to train anything.

Activating and checking your license sends your serial key, a machine ID made from your hardware and the Nomen version. Activation also sends your platform and the machine name you typed, if any. Nomen asks nomenapp.com for the latest version number. It downloads the species data and models from Hugging Face, and new releases from nomenapp.com. The iNat button opens iNaturalist in your browser with the species name. That’s the whole list. Generate report saves a zip to your Desktop. It goes nowhere unless you email it to support.

Yes. Matching needs no connection. Download the species data (about 4.5 GB) and, on Windows, the DirectX 12 bundle before you leave. Nomen checks your license when it’s online and keeps working for 60 days after the last check, and Setup shows the date. Before a long trip, open Nomen once while you’re still online. Lightroom Classic has its own offline limit, set by Adobe. The field guide has a checklist.

Nomen requires Adobe Lightroom Classic (version 13.0 or later) on an Apple Silicon Mac or Windows 10/11. Intel Macs aren’t supported. The matching engine needs about 1.3 GB on a Mac and 1.7 to 2.1 GB on Windows, plus about 4.5 GB of species data, which Nomen needs in full. Lightroom CC (cloud) isn’t currently supported.

Nomen’s commands are under Library > Plug-in Extras > Nomen. If they’re missing, check that the plug-in is installed and enabled via File > Plug-in Manager > Add. If the plug-in shows a non-running status, try removing and re-adding it. Restart Lightroom after making changes.

In Nomen 0.14.2 or later, open File > Plug-in Manager > Nomen and press Update plugin under Setup > Updates. It updates the matching engine too. On 0.14.1 or older, install by hand once, because Update plugin in those versions leaves the matching engine behind: download Nomen.zip and replace the whole Nomen.lrplugin folder, then quit Lightroom fully and reopen it. If Setup then says Species data is incomplete, click Download on the Species data row. Press Update assets whenever Setup offers it. Your species data and models stay in place, and so does your license. On Windows, also press Download on the DirectX 12 row in Species Packs. See the Download page for details.

Not if you have all of them. Setup then shows Species data as installed and offers no download. If only some are installed, Setup says Species data is incomplete and offers the rest. When only a few groups are missing, Nomen downloads just those. Nomen can’t match until the download finishes. If there isn’t enough free disk space, it says how much the download needs. Afterwards, the Species Packs section may offer Remove … pack files already in Species data to free the space taken by your older separate pack files. Nomen asks before removing them.

Nomen writes one IPTC caption (common and scientific names, location, a line for your notes, camera settings, and hashtags), replacing any caption already on the photo. It also writes a keyword hierarchy (Nomen > Group > Class > Order > Family > Genus > Species), common name keywords, and 20 custom metadata fields. Nine of those fields are searchable in Lightroom: Status, Scientific Name, Common Name, Confidence, Family Group, Region, Species Count, Detection, Rarity. Color labels are off by default. Turn them on under Matching and Keywords. Nomen writes nothing about a person in the frame, and with Leave out people ticked, a person never gets a species name.

The Skip already-matched photos setting in Matching and Keywords controls this. It’s off by default. With it on, Nomen skips photos that already have a manual or earlier Nomen match, preserving your manual IDs. Unmatched photos run again. With it off, Nomen matches every selected photo again and can overwrite a manual match.

Yes. Use Lightroom’s own undo. Nomen writes each photo as its own edit, so Cmd-Z on macOS or Ctrl-Z on Windows steps back through a batch one photo at a time.

Nomen checks your license when it’s online and keeps working for 60 days after the last check. If the license server is ever retired, a final update will remove the check, so the version you paid for keeps working.

Each license is a one-time purchase tied to your nomenapp.com account. Your tier sets how many machines you can activate (Personal: 2, Professional: 5, Organization: 15). Every tier has the same features and no usage limits, and you can upgrade at any time by paying the difference.

Yes. There’s a 14-day money-back guarantee. If Nomen doesn’t work for you, contact support for a full refund, no questions asked.

Nomen marks photos below your configurable confidence threshold (default 0.5) as unmatched. It writes no species keywords and clears the caption. With Leave out people ticked, a photo of people with no other subject is also saved as unmatched in Main subject and Every subject. Try a photo with a clearer view of the subject, or one where the subject fills more of the frame. You can also lower the confidence threshold in settings. If a country filter is set, Nomen can offer to search neighboring countries for an unmatched photo.

Nomen needs at least one species group ticked. A new install starts with nothing ticked, so pick a preset, tick the groups to search on the Species tab, or click Quick setup… at the top of the Run Nomen window.

Tick Leave out people on the Scan options tab of the Run Nomen dialog, or beside My photos show in Quick setup, then run the photo again in Main subject or Every subject. The option is off by default because it makes scans a bit slower, and Nomen remembers it once you tick it.

Nomen is in beta. We’d rather you hear the limits from us. A Clear match means no other species came close. It can still be wrong. Leave out people is off by default, and with it off, a person can come back matched to a species. With it on, the person pass runs in Main subject and Every subject only, and it mistakes something for a person on about 1% of photos, mostly insect close-ups. A photo containing only people still shows its whole-frame match beside the person cards. Nomen saves it as unmatched unless you tick or confirm that match. In Every subject, a person the subject finder never boxed gets no Person card. On Windows without the DirectX 12 bundle, subject finding has been checked on the processor only, not on a graphics card. Update assets can show a larger size than it actually downloads. Each run searches only the groups you tick, so a subject from an unticked group can come back with the closest name from the groups you did tick. Main subject offers to search all groups when a match is weak, but the other modes don’t. Some species groups, such as Octopus, Squid and Cuttlefish, still include extinct species. The subject-finder search words for 32 of the 63 groups haven’t been measured yet. The least certain: grasses, mosses, lichens, seaweed, aphids. On some Macs, a few buttons in Nomen’s dark windows are hard to read. Choosing Light under Window colours fixes it in the review windows, though maybe not in Quick setup. In rare cases, a batch runs slower or its progress bar jumps.