Culling a shoot in Photo Culler — the fast way

Before you start: what Photo Culler is

Photo Culler opens a folder of photos, lets you separate the keepers from the rest, and writes your decisions to a small text file next to each photo (an .xmp sidecar). That's the whole job. It doesn't import your photos into a library, it doesn't edit them, and it doesn't have a catalog to set up before you can begin. You point it at a folder and start culling.

Your originals are never moved or changed. Your picks, ratings, and labels live in the sidecars, so any app that reads XMP — Lightroom, Capture One, Photo Archive — picks them up later. Nothing is locked inside Photo Culler.

The six-step cull

1. Open a folder

Press ⌘O, or drag a folder straight onto the window. Photo Culler reads the photos in place — RAW and JPEG, including Olympus high-resolution .ori files. If those photos already have XMP sidecars (from a previous session, or from Lightroom), your existing picks, ratings, and labels load with them.

A shoot spread across several folders doesn't need several sessions — open more than one and cull them as a single run. If your files sit in dated subfolders, switch on Settings → Behavior → Include subfolders and the whole tree comes in at once. And if the app quits mid-cull, whether you closed it or it crashed, the session comes back where you left it the next time you launch.

2. Move through the photos

Use the arrow keys to move between photos in the grid. To look closely at a single frame, press Tab (or E) to switch to the loupe — the big single-photo view — and press Z to jump to 100% to check focus. Tab again to drop back to the grid. You can also double-click any thumbnail to open it in the loupe in one motion.

3. Make the call

This is the part your hands learn and never forget. One key, one decision:

• Space (or P) — pick it (a keeper)
• X — reject it
• U — unflag, clearing the pick or reject back to neutral
• 1–5 — give it a star rating (0 clears it)
• 6 7 8 9 — tag it with a color label (red, yellow, green, blue). The purple label lives in the Culling menu — it has no number key, since 0 now clears the rating.

After each decision the app advances to the next photo automatically, so you can hold a rhythm: look, press, look, press. (If you'd rather stay put after tagging, turn off auto-advance in Settings → Behavior.)

Every one of these is also on a right-click, in the grid and in the loupe — along with Start Compare and Show in Finder. Worth a look while the keys are still new; the menu shows what's set with a checkmark, and clicking a checked item clears it, exactly as pressing the key again would.

Pick, reject, and rating are smart about each other — rejecting a photo clears its rating, rating one clears the reject. Color labels are independent; you can label a photo whatever its pick state.

When two frames look identical: Compare

Shot the same moment three times? Press C to enter Compare. The photo you were on locks into the left pane as your reference, and you arrow through the rest of the burst on the right. Zoom is synchronized, so at 100% both panes show the exact same spot — the fastest way to find the one frame that's actually in focus. Your culling keys (pick, reject, rate, label) act on the right-hand candidate; press Return to promote it to the new reference and keep going, or Escape to exit. Focus-bracket bursts from OM-System cameras are grouped under one tile automatically — press J to collapse or expand a run, R to cycle its frames.

4. Filter down to what you kept

Once you've been through the folder, filter the grid to see only what matters:

• ⇧⌘P — picks only
• ⇧⌘X — rejects only
• ⇧⌘T — rated only
• ⇧⌘L — color-labeled only
• ⇧⌘U — still uncategorized
• ⇧⌘A — show everything again

Rating filters (1+, 2+, … stars) live in the filter bar at the top of the window. Press Escape at any time to clear the active filter.

5. Export your decisions to XMP

Press ⇧⌘E. (⌘E was a spare export key until 1.2.6; it now opens the current RAW in Photo Developer, so move the habit across.) Photo Culler writes your picks, ratings, and labels into an .xmp sidecar beside each photo. If you've set a copyright notice, creator name, or keywords in Settings, those get stamped in too. Everything already in the sidecar — a developer's edit settings, hierarchical keywords, another tool's metadata — is preserved untouched.

This is the step that saves your work. Until you export, your decisions live only in the current session.

6. Delete the rejects (optional)

Press ⇧⌘⌫ to move everything you rejected to the Trash. Photo Culler shows you the count and the total size first, and the files go to the macOS Trash — never a permanent delete — so you can fish one back out if you change your mind.

Three things that will make you happier on day one

Undo is your safety net. Press ⌘Z to step back through your decisions, one at a time. Tagged the wrong frame in a fast run? Undo and carry on.

Your decisions aren't saved until you export. Photo Culler keeps your session in memory and warns you if you try to open another folder or quit with un-exported decisions. When in doubt, ⇧⌘E before you leave.

Rejecting isn't deleting. X only marks a photo as a reject — it stays right where it is. Nothing leaves your folder until you explicitly run Delete Rejects (⇧⌘⌫), and even then it goes to the Trash, not the void.

If you only remember one thing

XMP is the contract. Your picks, ratings, and labels are written as plain Adobe-compatible sidecars next to your files — so the work you do here travels straight into Lightroom, Capture One, or anything else that reads XMP, and survives even if you stop using Photo Culler. You're not feeding a database you can't get back out of. How sidecars keep your work portable →

One caveat worth knowing before you cull. Sidecar ratings only show up in apps built to read them — browsers and cataloguing tools like Lightroom Classic, Adobe Bridge, Capture One (with XMP sync on), Photo Mechanic, FastRawViewer, and the rest of the DigTek suite. Apps that keep their own library (OM Workspace, Apple Photos) or that are pixel editors rather than cataloguers (Pixelmator Pro, Affinity Photo) won't display them — not because the sidecar is wrong, but because they're not looking at it. Which apps read your ratings, and which don't →

That's the whole cull. Open, decide, filter, export — and the keepers are ready for whatever you develop them in next.

Quick reference: the shortcuts from this guide