Cull wisely.

Cullwise is a culling and review application for photographers who shoot events, sports, and anything else that fills a card. It does two jobs.

First, it reads the shoot and rates every frame on how well it came out, so the obvious misses are already set aside before you start. It errs toward keeping — anything borderline stays in, because the expensive mistake is throwing away a frame you wanted.

Second, it gives you a proper contact-sheet grid and a full-screen loupe with the keyboard you already know, so making the final picks is fast.

I have shot dog sports and events for years, and the way I get from a full card to a delivered gallery settled into a shape a long time ago. Cullwise is that shape, built as an application. Here is the whole thing, the way I run it on a Saturday night.

• 1
  Shoot The part no software helps with.
• 2
  Ingest into Cullwise Straight off the card. Filenames and metadata are built from variables on the way in, so every frame lands already named the way I deliver it, with the event, the date, my copyright, and the client written into it. I never rename anything again.
• 3
  Cull the folder One command. Cullwise rates every frame in the shoot while I get a drink.
• 4
  Filter to the star-rated frames The misses drop out of view. Nothing is deleted, they are just not in my way anymore.
• 5
  Go through the rated frames fast, and color label the best One key per frame. A color goes on only the photos I am actually going to want to edit, the best of the best. Everything else keeps its stars and stays where it is.
• 6
  Filter to the color-labeled frames Now the contact sheet is just the selects.
• 7
  Import only those into Lightroom The stars and the labels travel with the files, so they are already there when Lightroom opens. A four-thousand-frame day comes into the catalog as a couple of hundred.
• 8
  Edit and deliver Clients, galleries, done.

That is my way, not the only way. The steps are configurable to a fair degree already: skip the cull if you would rather rate by hand, use tags instead of color labels, filter on whatever you like, and hand off to Capture One or anything else that reads a sidecar. If you shoot JPEG and the cull is the whole job, steps seven and eight are yours to drop.

And I want to hear how you work. If your workflow needs something Cullwise does not do yet, tell me. I am building for specific workflows as they come in, and the beta testers are already shaping what ships next.

What it does on its own

Every shoot gets the general cull. Cullwise reads each frame whole and sets aside the unusable and the soft. That works on anything you point it at — a Friday night game, a wedding, a herd of elk at dawn, a week in Iceland — and it needs nothing extra. This is the application. Packs are an option on top of it, and most shoots never touch one.

What a Subject Pack adds

A pack is a model trained on one kind of subject. When Cullwise finds that subject in a frame, it stops judging the picture and starts judging the subject. For the Dogs Pack that means the eye — the thing that actually decides whether an action frame was worth the shutter.

It is also where the 1:1 square in the loupe comes from: the square parks on the exact spot the pack judged. On a frame with no pack subject in it there is no square, because there is no one spot worth showing you.

You do not choose between them

With more than one pack installed, Cullwise finds what is in the frame and uses the pack that fits it. Where two could apply, the more specific one wins. A shoot with dogs, people, and scenery in it gets all three judged the right way in the same run, and there is a Subject setting if you ever want to hold a whole shoot to one.

Where this stands today

One pack exists so far: Dogs, and it ships included. We built it first for two reasons. It is the hardest subject there is to cull — a dog in mid-air, where the eye is small, fast, dark, and crossing the frame — so an engine that can call that one can call an easier one. And it is the one nobody else has built: every AI culler on the market is trained on faces, and none of them can tell you whether the dog's eye was sharp. Sports, wildlife, birds, and equestrian are where the next ones go.

If none of those is what you shoot, nothing is missing. The general cull is what rates your shoot either way, and it is what the application is for.

$179 one payment · two Macs · twelve months of updates

Not a subscription. Every other AI culler we know of is rented by the year; this one you buy, and the version you bought keeps working forever whether or not you ever pay us again. The whole deal »