How to use Cullwise.

The whole app, in the order you actually use it. The same ground is in the app itself under Help › Getting Started (⌘?) — this is the version with room to spread out.

Cullwise is the first pass on a big shoot: everything between the card coming out of the camera and the handful of frames you actually work on. Nothing here moves, renames or deletes a photo unless you ask it to.

Getting the photos in

There are three ways in, and you will use all of them.

Straight off the card

⌘G, or Ingest from Cards in step 1 of the bar across the top. Pick the card, pick where the photos go, and add a second drive as a backup while you are there.

Every photo is checked after it is copied and compared against what was on the card, so a file that arrived damaged is caught rather than trusted. A photo lands on both drives or on neither — a half-copied frame is worse to hand back than a missing one, and the card still holds it. Nothing is ever erased from the card; format it in the camera that will shoot it next.

The shoot opens as it fills. You do not wait for the card. The first hundred frames are on screen and cullable while the rest is still coming across.

Filenames can be built as they land — the date, the job, a sequence number, the camera, your own [variables] — and the window shows you a worked example of the name and the folder before a byte moves.

A folder you already have

⌘O, or drop a folder anywhere on the window. Subfolders are included by default, because most shoots nest by day, ring, room or handler. Untick Include subfolders in step 1 if you want the top level only — the photo count on the Cull button updates as you do.

The FOLDERS panel

Down the left side: your disks, your favorites, and the shoots you marked to come back to. Right-click a folder there to open it, cull it, give it a color, rename it, or set a reminder to clear it out in a few weeks. A card appearing in the machine shows up here too.

Culling the shoot

Press ⌘R, or the Cull button, which tells you how many photos it is about to work through. It goes frame by frame and gives each one stars.

★★★	Your strongest frames of the shoot.
★★	Strong.
★	Marginal — worth a second look.
no star	Likely not keepers.

Knowing what has been culled

A photo Cullwise has not rated yet carries a small ring at the top of its frame, and the ring goes the moment that photo is rated. So a folder covered in rings is one no cull has been near, and watching them clear is watching a run work through the shoot.

That distinction matters because no star and not yet looked at otherwise look identical on the contact sheet. A frame with no ring and no star is one Cullwise considered and did not think a keeper. A frame with a ring has not been considered at all. Hover a ring and it says so.

Your own ratings are safe

Four and five stars are reserved for you. Cullwise never writes them and never takes one away. It never puts a color label on a photo and never removes one, not even a cull from scratch. Those marks are yours in both directions.

Three stars means “a frame worth your eye,” not “guaranteed keeper.” The rating adapts to the shoot, so a dim indoor venue or a backlit subject is not unfairly marked down. The aim is to surface every usable frame so your own pass is fast — when a frame is borderline, it stays in.

Cull, or Cull from Scratch?

Everywhere you can start a run — the Cull button, a folder in the panel, a tab, a selection you right-click — you get the same two. They differ in one thing only: what happens to the stars you set yourself.

Cull	Rates the photos and leaves your own star ratings alone. When it finishes it tells you how many of your own ratings it kept.
Cull from Scratch	Clears every star first — yours included — then grades the whole folder again from blank. For when you have changed the settings and want the shoot judged on the new ones.

When you are not sure which you want, it is Cull.

Any run can be undone

Before a cull changes anything, Cullwise writes down the star rating and color label every photo already had. If a run turns out to be a mistake, File › Restore Ratings From… puts every photo back exactly as it was just before it — including the ones that had no rating at all. The last ten runs on a shoot are kept, and they live with the photos, so they survive copying the folder to another drive. There is nothing to switch on.

How long it takes

A run is not a wall you stand at. The shoot is on screen the whole time and the ratings appear as they are decided, so you can start your own pass at the top of the folder while the bottom is still being worked through.

Going through the shoot

This is where the time goes, so it is built to be one hand on the keyboard and no mouse at all.

G	The contact sheet.
E	One big photo. Arrow keys move through the shoot.
⌘1 – ⌘5	Your own star rating. ⌘0 clears it.
1 – 8	Color label. 0 clears it.
X	Reject — mark a frame for the bin without deleting it.
L	Lock a frame. The padlock appears on the thumbnail and in the loupe.
Z	Magnify to full size and check the eyes.
A	Play the voice memo you recorded on the camera.
I	This photo's information — caption, credit, keywords.

Four ways of looking

The contact sheet and the loupe are two of them. The other two are for the part that is actually hard — choosing between frames that are all good.

V	Compare. Two photos side by side, zooming and panning together, so you are judging the same eye on both. Pick two frames and press it; with nothing picked it puts up the two the cull rated highest.
N	Survey. The whole selection on one screen. Press / to drop the one you are on and the survivors grow to fill the space. Nothing is marked and nothing is written — when you leave, what is left is your selection.
⇧R	Reference. Pins one photo beside the loupe and keeps it there while you move through the shoot, for matching a look across a set.

One keypress per photo

Turn on Auto advance above the grid and every rating jumps you straight to the next frame. A shoot becomes one gesture per photo, all the way down.

Filtering

The strip down the left side narrows what you are looking at: stars, colors, rejects, locked frames, and the ones you tagged on the back of the camera during the day. Counts are always live, so you can see what you are hiding. Save a filter you use often and it is one click from then on.

Frames you already marked

If you tag a shot on the camera, or in another application afterwards, Cullwise sees it: those frames carry a check mark on the thumbnail, get their own filter, and can be sorted to the front so you start your pass with the ones you already cared about. Cullwise never adds or removes these marks.

Locking a frame

Press L and Cullwise will never write to that photo again — later runs leave its rating and its color exactly as they are, even a cull from scratch. You can still rate and label a locked frame yourself. The lock applies to the tool, not to you.

Several shoots at once

Open as many folders as you like and they sit in tabs across the top. Close one and it can be reopened; the tabs come back where you left them.

The shade behind your photographs

A very dark or very light surround changes how bright and contrasty a frame looks — it is why print viewing booths use a neutral grey. Right-click the photos to pick the shade that lets you judge your own work honestly. The shade every shoot opens with lives in Settings.

Fixing what needs fixing

Four jobs that used to mean opening something else.

Levelling a crooked frame

Press R. Nudge the horizon with , and . — hold them and the steps get finer, so you can land on a quarter of a degree. Drag the corners of the crop, press X to stand it up or lay it down, A to keep its shape while you drag, O to put a guide over it, P to see the picture you will actually deliver, and ⏎ when it is right.

The photo on disk is untouched. The levelling is remembered against the frame and baked in when you export, so you can change your mind a week later and the original is still the original. A levelled frame is marked on the contact sheet, so you can see at a glance which ones you have been at.

Renaming

⌘M. Renumber a shoot into the names the client gets, built from the date, the job, a sequence, or anything else the camera recorded. Sidecar files and voice memos follow their photograph, and nothing is ever overwritten — a name that is already taken stops the whole job before a single file moves.

A camera clock that was wrong

⌘T. Type the time the photo says it was taken and the time it really was; every photo in the selection shifts by the difference. This matters more than it sounds: a wrong clock is what makes two cameras at one wedding refuse to interleave. The old times are written down first, so Put Date and Time Back… undoes it.

Captions, credit and keywords

I for one photo's information, ⌥⌘I for every tag it carries. Fill a field once and apply it to the whole selection. Fields take [variables] too, so a caption can carry the date or the frame number without you typing either.

Rosters — four keystrokes instead of a sentence

At a trial there are two hundred runs, and every frame wants the dog's name, its breed and the handler's name. Typed out, that is minutes per photograph. Typed as ;wc8; it is four keystrokes.

A roster is the list you already keep — one row per subject, exported from a spreadsheet as tab-delimited text. The first column is the short code you will type; the rest is whatever you want it to write.

A roster is plain text, and this is the whole of it:

code    name    breed              handler          club
wc8     Bella   Border Collie      Sarah Whitlock   Fox River Agility
wc12    Ranger  Belgian Malinois   Tom Reyes        Lakeshore K9
wc19    Pip     Shetland Sheepdog  Dana Okonkwo     Fox River Agility

Columns are separated by tabs — which is what “export as tab-delimited text” gives you out of Numbers or Excel. A first row starting with the word code names the columns; without one they are numbered. Lines starting with # are notes to yourself and are ignored.

Then, in any metadata field:

• ;wc8; → Bella — the first column after the code, usually the name.
• ;wc8.breed; → Border Collie — any column, by its heading.
• ;wc8.2; → Border Collie — the same column by number, for a roster with no headings.

So a caption typed as ;wc8; clears the A-frame. ;wc8.breed;, handled by ;wc8.handler;. is written as “Bella clears the A-frame. Border Collie, handled by Sarah Whitlock.”

The READS AS box shows that before you write anything, for whichever field you are typing in. Codes and [variables] both resolve there, and both can be mixed in one field.

A code that isn't in the roster

It is written exactly as you typed it — never quietly emptied. A stray ;wc99; sitting in plain sight in a caption is a mistake you can see and fix; a caption that silently lost its subject's name is a mistake that ships. The same goes for a column heading that isn't there, and for a row that stops short.

Added a late entry to the roster mid-trial? Reload reads the file again without closing anything.

Delivering

Export

⇧⌘E. A delivery is a list of recipes you tick, not one setting at a time: full size for the client, a web size for the gallery, a square for social — all three come out of a single pass over the photographs. Each recipe has its own size, quality, folder and filenames, and can be watermarked. If you have a server set up, a recipe can be sent straight to it.

Do the same delivery again with ⌥⇧⌘E and no window at all.

Dragging them out

Select your picks — click, then shift-click or ⌘-click to add more — and drag them onto Lightroom, Capture One or the Finder in the Dock. They arrive with their stars and colors already on them, so the application you drop into imports just the picks and nothing else. The originals stay where they are.

Moving them into a folder

Drag a selection onto a folder in the FOLDERS panel and it moves there. The folder under the pointer lights up so you can see where they are about to land, and hovering over a closed folder opens it, so somewhere three levels down is still reachable without letting go. Cullwise asks before anything moves, and names the folder's full path — you have a RAW folder under every shoot, and the name on its own cannot tell one from another.

Each photo's sidecar goes with it, so the ratings and color labels travel too, along with anything you levelled or cropped. Same disk, they move; another disk, they are copied and the originals stay in the shoot — the Finder's own rule. Hold ⌥ to force a copy. Locked frames are left where they are.

Clearing out the rest

⌘⌫ moves everything you rejected to the Trash, all at once, once you are sure. Rejecting a frame never deletes it — deleting is a separate act you perform deliberately, and it goes to the Trash, where you can put it back.

Two kinds of setting

They are easy to mix up, and they answer different questions.

Cull settings	In step 2. The recipe for the next run — how strong a frame has to be before it earns each star. Change it when a shoot came back more generous or more severe than you wanted.
Settings ⌘,	How the app behaves, every shoot: the shade behind your photographs, the size thumbnails open at, the order the table sorts in, your own [variables], what happens when you plug a card in, and the keyboard.

Every key in the app can be changed. Settings › Keyboard Shortcuts is the same list the menu bar carries, so it is always the one telling the truth — if a key in this manual does not match your copy, look there.

Keyboard shortcuts

As shipped. Anything here can be rebound in Settings › Keyboard Shortcuts.

Getting photos in and out

⌘G	Ingest from cards
⌘O	Open a shoot folder
⇧⌘E	Export
⌥⇧⌘E	Export again with the last settings
⇧⌘R	Reveal the shoot in the Finder
⇧⌘T	Reopen the folder you just closed

Culling

⌘R	Cull
⌘.	Stop the run

Looking

G	Contact sheet
E	Loupe — one big photo
Z	Magnify to full size
V	Compare — two photos side by side
N	Survey — the whole selection on one screen
/	Drop the photo you are on out of the survey
⇧R	Reference — pin a photo beside the loupe
⇧D	Show or hide the detail inset
[ / ]	Rotate left or right
⌘+ / ⌘−	Bigger or smaller thumbnails
⌘F	Search the shoot
⌥⌘N	Show or hide the folders panel
⌥⌘M	Show or hide the metadata panel

Marking

⌘0 – ⌘5	Star rating
0 – 8	Color label
X	Reject
L	Lock the frame
⌘Z	Undo
⌘⌫	Move the rejects to the Trash
⇧⌘⌫	Move the selection to the Trash

Fixing

R	Straighten
, / .	Level left or right
< / >	Level by a whole degree
A	Keep the crop's shape while dragging
X	Turn the crop upright or lay it down
C	Reset the crop
O	Cycle the guide over the crop
P	Show the picture as it will be delivered
⌘M	Rename photos
⌘T	Adjust date and time
I	This photo's information
⌥⌘I	Every tag the photo carries
A	Play the voice memo

A and X do the straighten job while straighten is on, and go back to the voice memo and reject the moment you leave it.

Where everything is saved

Short answer: with the photographs, not inside the app. Copy a shoot folder to another drive and your work goes with it.

Stars and colors	Written into the photo's own information, in the place every other application in your workflow looks — into a sidecar file beside a raw file, the way Lightroom, Photo Mechanic and Bridge all do it.
Rejects and locks	Kept in the shoot folder.
Levelling and crops	Kept in the shoot folder, against the frame. The photo itself is not altered until you export.
Undo for a cull	Kept in the shoot folder. The last ten runs.
Your settings	With the app, on this Mac.

Nothing is deleted behind your back. Rejecting marks a frame; clearing out the rejects moves them to the Trash, where they can be put back.