Hi Carmina,
I definitely get not wanting to create another copy of your data, I realized this about Camelot just a little late, and we did have to buy a 4 TB external hard drive. The unique names that Camelot assigns to its copies of the data are also not friendly if you want to move things around.
I mentioned that Wild.ID is being more and more integrated with Wildlife Insights, but it can still be used as a standalone software. It has the same format as Camelot, but I think it doesn't create and additional copy (I might be wrong about this, though). You should take a look at this, it might be what you need.
As for detection, Camelot puts together batches of photos, uploads them to Microsoft's servers, and then gets the resulting database back. The model they use, however, is available and you can run it on your own computer. The AI model that it uses is called Megadetector. You used to have to run it from the command line, but recently Petar Gyurov posted this GUI that makes using Megadetector soooo much easier. You just tell the software where your photos are, and let it run. You can decide whether you trust it enough to sort your photos automatically, or check yourself. In most conditions it performs very well, you may have issues when you can only see parts of an animal behind some vegetation. The check would take less time than going through the raw pictures, since it marks boxes where it found things. You still have to identify the pictures after they're sorted. Megadetector will work on any computer, but it performs much faster if it has an Nvidia graphical card. However, setting this up is a little tricky.
Finally, the output from Megadetector can be integrated into the workflow of Timelapse, another software. I've never used this one so I can't really say how well it works.
Integrating everything can be a little intimidating, so feel free to ask if you need guidance for any of these steps.
Best,
Juan
