What's new in Photo Culler

Sidecar safety, inside and out

• Photo Culler now sees decisions it used to miss. Ratings, picks and colour labels can be stored in more than one way inside a sidecar, and Photo Culler previously recognised only the most common one. Open a folder edited by another tool and any stars, flags or labels it wrote now show up where they were invisible before — which also means Photo Culler stops writing a second, conflicting value alongside the one already there.
• Colour labels from other apps are no longer cleared. Photo Culler understands the five standard colour labels by their English names. A label written in another language — a Norwegian Lightroom's "Rød" — or from a custom label set like "Good to Use" looked like no label to Photo Culler, and exporting the photo removed it. Those labels are now left exactly as they are. Setting a label yourself still replaces whatever was there, as before; this only changes what happens when you haven't set one.
• Sidecars from other photo apps stay intact. Some apps write a photo's metadata as a single compact block, and that block is where details like frame numbers, capture dates and rights information live. When Photo Culler exported its culling decisions into a sidecar written that way, it could damage the file's structure, leaving everything already inside it unreadable to Lightroom and other tools. Photo Culler now rewrites the block into its expanded form before adding anything, so the existing contents survive exactly as they were. Sidecars Photo Culler wrote itself were never affected. Files already damaged aren't repaired by this update — if you have any, re-exporting from the app that made them will rebuild them.

Right-click everything, and a tougher export

• The whole culling vocabulary on a right-click. Right-click any photo — in the grid or the loupe — for pick, reject, rating, and color label, plus Start Compare and Show in Finder. It's everything the keyboard does, now discoverable with the mouse: the current state shows a checkmark, and clicking a checked item clears it, exactly like the keys. The keyboard-first flow is untouched — the menu just teaches it. Show in Finder is also new in the File menu, and if you use Photo Developer, RAW files gain "Edit in Photo Developer" (right-click and File menu, ⌘E) — the command appears only when Photo Developer is installed.
• Export got tougher. Photo Culler now checks that every destination folder actually accepts writes before the first sidecar is written — a locked SD card or a read-only folder surfaces as a clear dialog up front, with nothing half-written, and you can grant access and continue on the spot. If an export ever does fail midway — a disk filling up, a network share dropping — the error tells you exactly where it stopped: which file, how many sidecars were written, how many weren't attempted, and that your decisions are safe to export again.
• Stricter Lightroom sidecar handling. For sidecars that keep hierarchical keywords in their own section, culling fields now land only in the main section, leaving Lightroom's data byte-for-byte untouched. Multi-folder sessions now say which folder holds the session report.
• One shortcut change. Export now lives solely on ⇧⌘E. ⌘E previously worked as a spare export key; it now belongs to Edit in Photo Developer. And pressing a ⌘-shortcut no longer triggers the bare-key action underneath it — ⌘C out of habit won't drop you into Compare anymore.

There is no public 1.2.5 — that build was withdrawn from review before it shipped, and its work arrived here instead.

Sharp DNGs in the loupe

• Some DNGs carry only a small preview inside — Adobe DNG Converter's "medium" setting and phone exports are common sources — and Photo Culler used that preview for speed, which left those files soft in the loupe. It now spots a preview too small to display sharply and decodes the actual sensor data instead. Sharp at fit-to-screen, with default settings, no zooming required. Cameras that embed full-size previews are unaffected and browse just as fast as before.

Cull across folders, and never lose a session

• Cull more than one folder at once. Open — or drag in — several folders and Photo Culler treats them as a single session. And a new option, Settings → Behavior → Include subfolders, lets you point at a memory card or a whole shoot folder and pull in every photo inside it. It's off by default, so each folder still loads flat unless you ask for more.
• Your work survives an accident. If Photo Culler quits unexpectedly — a crash, a power loss, or an accidental ⌘Q — reopening the same folder (or, if you were culling several folders at once, the same set of them) now offers to restore the culling decisions you hadn't exported yet. Nothing is ever written to your photos or their sidecars until you export; this just remembers your in-progress decisions privately, so an interruption doesn't cost you the session. On by default (Settings → Behavior → Recover unsaved sessions), and if you happened to edit a sidecar in another app in the meantime, the newer version on disk is kept.
• Safer sidecar preservation. Photo Culler never overwrites a metadata sidecar it can't read. If you cull a folder that already carries XMP sidecars — from Lightroom, Photo Developer, or another tool — and one of them can't be read (an unusual text encoding, a file briefly locked by another app, a network drive that hiccups), Photo Culler now leaves that file exactly as it was instead of replacing it, and tells you which photos it skipped so you can retry. Your develop settings and keywords stay put. On a fresh folder with no existing sidecars — the usual way Photo Culler is used — nothing changes.

Labels count at export

• Color labels now export on their own. A photo carrying only a color label — no pick, reject, or rating — now gets an XMP sidecar too, and the export dialog counts labels alongside ratings, picks, and rejects. If you run label-only passes, your labels reach Lightroom and the rest of your tools every time. (Labels still don't count toward culling progress — they're organization, not decisions.)
• End-of-session dialogs fit their content. The export, delete, and session-report dialogs now size to what they have to say — no more clipped text or cramped buttons — and long filenames truncate tidily in the delete confirmation.
• Fixed: session and deletion reports now state the correct app version (they'd read "v1.0" since launch).

A sharper viewer

• A faster loupe. Switching between the grid and a single photo keeps your place — no jump back to the top, no stutter — and a zoomed-in photo opens sharp instead of blurring for a moment. Arrowing through a shoot stays locked to the photo you're actually on, with no drift.
• A proper 100%. "100%" now means a true 1:1 pixel-peep on every display — including external and non-Retina monitors, where it previously rendered at about half size. Press Z or double-click to toggle fit ↔ 100%.
• New: Full-resolution zoom (optional). Switch it on in Settings → Behavior to pixel-peep the full RAW sensor at true 1:1 — it sharpens in place as the file decodes. Left off, 100% stays instant off a screen-resolution preview.
• These improvements apply in Compare too, where both panes zoom to the same spot at 100%.

Compare

The first App Store update since 1.1.5 — it bundles several months of work, led by Compare.

• New: Compare. Put two photos side by side and keep the sharper one. Select a photo and press C — it locks into the left pane as your reference while you arrow through the rest in the right pane. Zoom is synchronized, so at 100% both panes show the exact same spot — the fastest way to pick the sharpest frame in a burst. Your pick, reject, rate, and label keys act on the candidate; press Return to promote it to the new reference and keep going. Esc exits.
• Focus-bracket bursts from OM-System cameras are grouped under one tile with a shot count — collapse the run with J, cycle the frames with R. Other cameras are unaffected.
• RAW+JPEG pairs are handled as one capture: a RAW and its same-name JPEG appear as a single tile, so one decision writes one sidecar instead of the two files fighting over it. Reject + delete trashes both files.
• Keyboard shortcuts now line up with the rest of the photo suite. Export moved to ⇧⌘E (⌘E still works for now), and Delete Rejected Photos moved to ⇧⌘⌫ — clear of ⌘D, so a destructive action no longer sits on a common key. New: P picks and U unflags (Space still picks); 0 clears the star rating, and the purple label moved to the Culling menu.
• The detail view fills the window at 100% (press Z or double-click), pans by drag or two-finger swipe without sliding off into the black, loads surrounding photos ahead so navigation is instant, and renders DNGs with small embedded previews sharp. E toggles between the grid and the detail view, alongside Tab.

A faster loupe

• The loupe feels noticeably quicker on arrow navigation: the surrounding photos load in the background while you're looking at the current one, so most arrow taps land instantly.
• No more flash to black between photos — the previous frame stays up until the next is ready, and a soft preview bridges the wait on slower decodes.
• DNG files now look sharp at fit-to-screen. Some DNGs (Adobe DNG Converter "medium," older iPhone ProRAW, some phone exports) were being shown from a tiny embedded preview; the decode now falls back to the full sensor data when the preview is too small.
• Stepping backward through photos you just viewed is reliably fast — recently-seen frames stay warm in memory.

Sort the grid

• Sort by filename, capture date, rating, or import order — ascending or descending — from the header or the View menu. Your choice is remembered between launches. Date sort uses EXIF capture date, falling back to file date.
• Double-click a thumbnail to jump straight into the loupe.
• Fixed: in the loupe, arrow keys now follow the order shown in the grid (including any active filter or sort) — multi-camera shoots no longer looked like they were stuck on one camera.
• Fixed: numeric filenames now sort naturally everywhere — IMG_2 before IMG_10.

Reliable round-trips, clearer errors

• XMP sidecars from Lightroom, Adobe Bridge, and other tools that split metadata across multiple blocks now round-trip without corruption — hierarchical keywords and plugin metadata are preserved byte-for-byte when you re-export.
• Keywords containing special characters (&, <, >, ") survive a re-export cleanly instead of being doubled or mangled.
• Export and delete failures now show a clear dialog with Try Again instead of silently closing — and your decisions are kept across the retry.
• "Import Folder" is now "Open Folder" throughout the app — the folder is read in place, not copied into a library, so "Open" is the honest word.

Dialogs that behave

• Typing in the export dialog and Settings no longer fires culling shortcuts in the background — your keystrokes land as text.
• The progress bar now reflects how far you've moved through the folder, not just how many decisions you've made. Leaving a photo uncategorized on purpose still counts as reviewed.
• "Clear existing description" is now a per-export checkbox in the export dialog, so captions from earlier sessions are no longer wiped silently.
• Revisiting a folder that already has XMP sidecars no longer falsely warns about unsaved changes.
• Full keyboard control of the export, success, and completion dialogs — Return confirms, Escape cancels.
• A single press of Z reliably toggles zoom again after moving to the next photo.
• Added support for Olympus high-resolution .ori RAW files.

First update from real feedback

• Auto-advance is now optional — turn it off in Settings → Behavior to stay on the current photo after tagging.
• Clear All Decisions now asks for confirmation before it resets your session.
• Color labels now appear in the info panel and the sidebar, matching the pick and rating badges.
• Clearer export summary when metadata applies to every photo, plus a gentle reminder when copyright isn't set in Settings.

Keyboard-first culling

• Open a folder and separate the keepers from the rest — pick (Space), reject (X), rate (1–5), and color-label (6–0), one keystroke per decision, with auto-advance to keep your rhythm.
• Decisions are written as Adobe-compatible XMP sidecars and read back on open, so they round-trip with Lightroom, Capture One, and Photo Archive — and everything else in the sidecar is preserved.
• EXIF inspector (camera, lens, shutter, aperture, ISO), visual filters, multi-level undo, optional IPTC copyright/creator/keyword stamping, and a session report.
• Delete Rejects moves rejected photos to the macOS Trash — never a permanent delete.
• One-time purchase. No subscription, no cloud, no account.