LrGenius vs. Peakto
Free open-source Lightroom plugin vs. Mac universal photo organiser.
Quick verdict
Choose Peakto if you work across Lightroom, Capture One, Apple Photos, or other apps on a Mac and want a single unified library with AI search and culling across all of them.
Choose LrGeniusAI if you are committed to Lightroom Classic, need Windows support, and want AI keywording, captions, semantic search, species identification, culling, and editing in one free, open-source plugin — with the option to run everything 100% locally, with AI models built into the plugin or via Ollama and LM Studio.
Feature comparison
| Aspect | LrGeniusAI beta | Peakto |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Lightroom Classic plugin | Standalone Mac app + LR plugin bridge |
| Platform | macOS + Windows | macOS only |
| Works with | Lightroom Classic | Lightroom, Capture One, Apple Photos, Luminar, and more |
| AI keywording | Yes — open-vocabulary, prompt-tunable | Yes — local AI tags |
| Captions / descriptions / alt-text | Yes | Limited |
| Semantic / natural-language search | Yes | Yes |
| Species identification (taxonomic) | Yes — BioCLIP 2 on-device, with rank & confidence | No — generic subject tags |
| Face recognition | Yes — clustering and People dialog (beta) | Yes |
| AI culling | Yes, face-aware (beta) | Yes |
| Learns personal editing style | AI Edit — from your own saved edits (beta) | No |
| Runs locally / offline | Yes (built in, or Ollama / LM Studio) | Yes (local AI) |
| Open source | Yes (AGPL-3.0) | No |
| Aesthetic score (best-photo ranking) | Yes — AestheticSigLIP score (1–9) and genre, set at index time; search, sort and cull by it | Yes — AI aesthetic analysis |
| AI agents (MCP) | Yes — built-in MCP agent bridge for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, LM Studio, Cursor; read-only mode and stop button | Not advertised |
| Pricing | Free | Subscription (macOS only) |
Where each tool excels
Peakto: the cross-app universal organiser
Peakto's strongest selling point is breadth: it ingests catalogs from Lightroom Classic, Lightroom CC, Capture One, Apple Photos, Luminar, and several other apps, giving Mac photographers a single unified library with AI search across all of them. If you have years of photos spread across multiple apps, Peakto saves significant manual migration effort.
LrGeniusAI: deep Lightroom integration, free, cross-platform
LrGeniusAI lives inside Lightroom Classic as a first-class plugin. It writes AI-generated keywords, captions, titles, and alt-text directly into your catalog via the Lightroom SDK, and its semantic search shows results in a standard Lightroom collection so you never leave the app. It is also the only free, open-source option in this comparison, and the only one that runs on both macOS and Windows.
It is also the only one that identifies species taxonomically: BioCLIP 2 runs on your own machine and writes the scientific name, common name, rank, confidence and full Linnean taxonomy into searchable metadata fields, optionally as a keyword hierarchy too. Peakto's local AI produces subject tags such as "bird" or "flower", which is a different job.
Because LrGeniusAI is in beta, results vary by model and feature maturity — check the FAQ and latest release notes before committing it to a production workflow.
New in LrGeniusAI: aesthetic scores and AI agents
Peakto also has an AI aesthetic analysis, so scoring photos is not what sets the two apart. LrGeniusAI's score (AestheticSigLIP, 1 to 9, plus a genre) is written into Lightroom metadata fields, can be searched, sorted and filtered inside Lightroom, and feeds culling.
LrGeniusAI can also be driven by an AI assistant. Through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), Claude Code, Claude Desktop, LM Studio, Cursor and other MCP apps can search your catalog, cull, rate, keyword, fill collections and change develop settings in Lightroom itself. Everything runs on your computer, and with a local model nothing leaves it. An agent works on its own and can be wrong on many photos at once, so there is a read-only mode and a stop button, and you should back up your catalog first.