The best photo culling software is meant for speeding up the process of sorting photos. With the help of the programs described in the article, you can quickly browse through hundreds of photos and find poor quality pictures, remove duplicates and place the remaining images in the necessary folders.
I selected the best photo culling software by evaluating the built-in tools for sorting images, namely how fast and intuitive they are. I also looked at additional options such as image editing, batch processing capabilities, and ease of organizing photos after culling.
Programs will speed up routine processes so that photographers can devote more time to image editing and presenting their works.
Verdict: With Adobe Lightroom, you can sort images in several ways. You can quickly cull your pictures by giving them a rating from 0 to 5. Thus, you can remove low-rated images. This method is suitable if you need to select works for your portfolio. You can also mark bad and good images with flags or flowers.
In addition, you can use a plug-in from Canon for image culling. This tool selects photos based on criteria such as sharpness, noise, exposure, contrast, closed eyes and red eyes. You can adjust parameters to control the process. Once the analysis is over, you will have a list of photos marked with multi-colored flags, depending on the quality.
Verdict: Photo Mechanic simplifies photo management: you can download pictures from your memory card in a few clicks and choose the best ones. The program has tools for selecting, evaluating and organizing photos. Moreover, you can view pictures without delay in rendering.
Photo Mechanic culling capabilities are impressive. You can add dynamic titles, copyright information and keywords to each photo or group of images. Also, the program allows you to overlay watermarks on photos and use GPS coordinates to automatically add names of cities, states and countries.
Verdict: Nektony Duplicate File Finder is a simple-to-use photo culling software that allows you to quickly find and remove duplicate files that take up valuable space on your hard drives. Its interface is pretty intuitive, you need to select a hard drive or files for scanning and start searching for duplicates. You can also exclude some files from the search if they are stored in the cloud storage services, such as Dropbox and Google Drive.
In a few minutes, the program will display a list of potential duplicate files so that you could preview their content. It will help you ensure that you won’t delete important data by mistake.
Verdict: ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate is a program for viewing, editing, deleting and organizing photos. This is also great photo culling software for work with RAW images, quick sorting of different photos, and multilevel editing. ACDSee program is also suitable for batch photo editing, adding keywords and organizing files.
Working in the program, you will notice how easy it is to manage pictures: you can switch between images in one click, and there are DAM tools for organizing photos. In addition, you can add geo-tags to images, view photos in tree view mode, cache pictures, etc.
Verdict: Being based on the AI engine, AfterShoot enables you to speed up the process of culling and save loads of time. It will find duplicate shots after analyzing captured subjects and locations where the images were taken. Thanks to the Key Faces option, you can preview the faces of the people in your photos.
After selecting the best images from the batch, you can quickly export them to Lightroom or CaptureOne. It will allow you to preserve their ratings and color codes. Using this software, you can also save your images to your local folders, which makes it perfect for those who use Adobe Bridge or Photoshop for editing their pics.
Verdict: FastStone Image Viewer combines tools for organizing, selecting, converting and editing photos. It is convenient to work in the program, as the interface resembles Windows Explorer. You can select the best frames while resizing your photo using one of 11 repeated culling algorithms. The program also allows you to compare images side-by-side, so that you can compare up to 4 photos at a time and delete low-quality images.
Other cool features of this photo viewer include image retouching, color correction, drop shadow effects, slide show transitions. The list of supported file formats is impressive – PNG, JPEG, BMP, PSD, TIFF, GIF, RAW and others.
Verdict: Exposure Software lets you work with images without going through long importing. You can check the boxes on the pictures you don't like. Moreover, you can select pictures both with the mouse and with the help of hotkeys. Once you have selected a photo, you automatically go to the next image in the list.
Rejected photos will be marked in gray. In addition, you can hide unwanted photos altogether. This image culling program allows marking the remaining photos with stars, giving them ratings from 1 to 5 or put down color marks for quick classification of pictures. There is also a Side-By-Side image comparison option. You can enlarge photos to compare fine details such as facial expressions.
Verdict: BreezeBrowser Pro is suitable for separating good images from low-quality ones. It can be called the best photo culling software because it provides complete information about the pictures: focal points, metadata, full-size and enlarged version of a picture. By downloading the software, you also get tools for editing and managing your photos. You can use the algorithm to sharpen your photo, resize it or reduce noise.
The program has a batch image processing function. You can convert, print, rename and rotate several photos at once. Together with BreezeBrowser Pro, you get tools for viewing thumbnails, comparing photos, correcting noise. Besides, you can manage photos and folders without complex manipulations.
Verdict: FilterPixel is an excellent tool if you need to cull photos quickly. The program automatically tags out-of-focus, blinks, and other undesired photos as rejects and, with a click, automatically selects the best one photo out of a similar set of photos based on composition, lighting, expressions, etc. In addition, though, you have complete control to overwrite the automations & can tag/untag, apply star ratings and alter colors manually.
Since the program runs AI on the cloud, its speed is powered by GPU machines that can cull thousands of your photos in a few minutes. There are unique features such as AI sliders that you can drag to get your sharpest photos quickly and faceviews to quickly check faces without zoom-in. The program syncs with popular XMP-supported editors so that you can take all of your culled photos seamlessly into Lightroom, PhotoMechanic, Capture One, etc.
Verdict: Thanks to FastRawViewer, you can quickly navigate hundreds of images and select the ones you need to edit, import or delete due to poor quality. The program has tools for evaluating RAW files: you can view the histogram and evaluate the image quality at the pixel level.
You can view and sort images directly on the memory card. The program also allows users to mark the photos they want to edit with asterisks or colored tags. After you have selected the necessary images, the information about each photo is saved in a separate file, so that you could send the data to programs for photo post-processing.
