Workflow Guides

Your first match

1. Pick a small test batch

Start with a single folder of 10 to 20 photos from one shoot where you know what species are in the frame. This makes it easy to verify whether Nomen is getting it right.

2. Run Nomen with Full review

Select the photos in Library, click Match, and choose Main subject as the detection mode with Full review (one photo at a time) as the review mode. If your photos have GPS data, leave geographic filtering on auto. If not, select the country where the shoot took place.

3. Review the detections

When the Review Detections dialog appears, look at each detection card. The bounding box shows what Nomen found in the image. Below each crop, the suggestion list shows species matches ranked by confidence and tagged with a rarity label (very common, common, uncommon, rare, or not recorded) for the region you’re in.

4. Verify and exclude

Go through each detection. Check that the bounding boxes actually contain wildlife. Uncheck any that grabbed background, coral, or other non-subjects. Use the verification links next to each suggestion to check species you are not sure about.

5. Apply to your catalog

Click “Apply Selected,” then “Apply to Catalog.” Check the results in Lightroom’s keyword panel and metadata fields. If the matches look right, you are ready to scale up.

Matching a full trip

1. Work one folder at a time

Do not select your entire catalog or even an entire trip at once. Work one folder at a time: one shoot, one day, one location.

2. Narrow the species group

Before running, set the species group if you know what you shot. A dive trip? Set it to Fish, or to the aquatic groups you expect. A birding trip? Set it to Birds. This reduces false positives from unrelated species groups and speeds up matching.

3. Start with Full review

Use Full review for the first folder so you see every match before it lands in the catalog. If the matches are consistently good for this type of subject and these shooting conditions, you can switch to Quick review or Don’t review for the remaining folders from the same trip.

4. Spot-check after each batch

After each batch, open the metadata panel on 5 to 10 matched photos and verify the species. If something looks wrong, you caught it early while it is still one folder, not your whole library.

Working through a backlog

1. Start with your most recent trips

The photos are freshest in your memory, you are most likely to catch errors, and the results are most immediately useful. These are the photos clients, editors, or your own searches are most likely to need.

2. Work chronologically backward

One trip at a time. Use Full review until you trust the results for a given type of subject and shooting condition. Switch to Quick review or Don’t review only when you are confident in what the model does well with your photos.

3. Prioritize what you actually need

If a client asks whether you have a particular species, match that trip first. Do not try to work through your entire backlog in order. Match what is most useful to you right now.

4. Set realistic expectations

Nomen turns weeks of manual keywording into hours of supervised matching. It does not turn it into minutes. The review step is where the quality comes from. Skip it and you risk filling your catalog with plausible-looking but wrong keywords, which is worse than no keywords at all.

When matches are wrong

1. Check the suggestions list

Open the metadata panel and look at the Suggestions field. The correct species may be in the top 10 list. If it is, re-run the photo with Full review and select the right suggestion.

2. Your corrections are preserved

If “Skip already-matched photos” is enabled in settings, your manual correction is preserved on future batch runs. Nomen will not overwrite it.

3. Diagnose batch problems

If you ran a large batch and many matches are wrong, the problem is usually one of three things: wrong species group selected (matching birds against the fish database), no geographic filtering (getting species from the wrong continent), or photos with no clear subject (landscapes, camp shots, gear photos mixed in with wildlife).

4. Adjust for next time

Narrow the species group, enable GPS auto-detect or set the correct country, and pre-filter your selection in Lightroom to include only wildlife photos before clicking Match.