Culling Photos

RawCull is not a tool for image editing; it is solely intended for selecting and copying selected images for editing by dedicated software such as DxO PL, Lightroom, and others.

A photo culling application is specialized software designed to assist photographers in efficiently reviewing, organizing, and selecting the most suitable images from a photo shoot. RawCull supports Focus Peaking and Focus Points.

Persistent Marking and Session Recovery

RawCull automatically saves your marking decisions as you work, allowing you to pause and resume your culling session at any time. Your marks, ratings, and review status are saved to disk, so if you need to continue later, simply reopen the same folder and your progress will be restored.

Thumbnail Performance

Thumbnails are generated and kept in memory during your session for fast navigation. RawCull also maintains a disk cache of thumbnails for previously reviewed catalogs, enabling instant loading when you return to the same folder in the future.

Two-Phase Culling Workflow

RawCull supports an optional two-phase culling approach that separates the initial triage from the final star rating.

Please be mindful that when using the keyboard to rate, RawCull will automatically advance to the next thumbnail.

Phase 1 — Pick and Reject

Use P and X to do a fast first pass through all images:

• P marks an image as a keeper (rating 0, shown as P in the stats bar)
• X marks an image as rejected (rating −1, shown in red)

The header bar shows live counts — ✕ rejected, P kept, and the number of unrated images — so you always know where you stand. Click the unrated count to filter and show only images you have not yet triaged.

Phase 2 — Star Rating

Once you have worked through the pick/reject pass, filter to keepers using the P pill in the rating filter row. You can then apply star ratings 2–5 to your selected images. Only images with a rating of 2 or higher are copied to the final catalog.

Sharpness-assisted classification

After running Sharpness Scoring, you can auto-classify the entire catalog in one step. Select a threshold percentage (20–80 %) from the Threshold picker and press Apply. Images scoring at or above the threshold are marked as keepers (P); images below are marked as rejected (X). You can then review and adjust before proceeding to star rating.

Keyboard

Use these keyboard shortcuts for efficient culling:

No images are deleted from the temporary catalog. Only images with a rating of 2 or higher may be copied to the final catalog for images. A rating of 1 marks an image as rejected, keeping it visible but excluded from the copy step.

The tagging commands also works in Zoom views.

Icons in the toolbar

Hover the mouse over an icon to see a help message. Icons from left to right:

• copy tagged files
• show all thumbnails in a grid
• show all tagged thumbnails
• switch between horizontal and vertical thumbnail view
• show saved files
• hide the inspector

Rating filter pills

The grid view header contains a row of coloured pills for filtering and sorting thumbnails by rating:

Tap a pill to activate the filter; tap it again or press ✕ to return to the full view. Filtering is non-destructive and does not affect saved ratings.

Step 1: Select Your Temporary Catalog

After copying images from your camera to a temporary catalog on your Mac, select that folder in RawCull. The application scans all images and generates previews for quick review. This process reads your photo metadata and creates a visual index of all images in the selected directory.

By default, the Sidebar is hidden. To access new catalogs, toggle the Sidebar via View → Show Sidebar. The Sidebar offers only one option: selecting new catalogs for scanning.

During scanning, you can monitor progress as the application indexes your images. Depending on the size of your library, this may take a few moments.

Step 2: Post-Scan Display

Once scanning completes, RawCull displays your full photo library with a thumbnail grid and preview controls ready for culling.

The inspector can be hidden by toggling the hide/show icon on the toolbar.

Vertical and horizontal view of thumbnails

Choose your preferred layout for the thumbnails. At this point, you can:

• Navigate through images using arrow keys or click navigation
• View the current image in the main preview area
• Rate images using keys 0–5, or press t to apply the default tag (rating 3, green)
• Use p and x for the two-phase pick/reject pass

You may also zoom in on details by using the + and - buttons. The image is either a 1024 px or 2048 px thumbnail, and for optimal results, a double-click on the image will extract the JPG file from the ARW format. This is particularly useful for viewing and focusing on specific areas. See Zoom view.

Zoom view

A double-click on an image zooms in, using either an extracted JPG or a generated thumbnail. See Settings for details. Utilize the plus (+) and minus (-) keys to zoom in or out on an image, whether it is a thumbnail or an extracted JPG file.

Culling by Grid View

A double-click on an image in grid view also opens a zoom view.

Shows all thumbnails in a grid view. Use the number keys 0–5, p, x, or t to rate images, and arrow keys to navigate. Thumbnails are colour-coded by their rating for quick visual triage.

The rating filter pills in the grid header let you narrow down which images are shown. Select any pill to display only images at that rating — for example, the P pill shows only your keepers, while the red pill shows only rejected images. Selecting P also includes all scored images.

Show only rejected images.

Shows only tagged images.

Step 3: Copy tagged images

Only photos with a rating of 2 or higher are copied to the final catalog. Keepers (rating 0), unrated (rating 0), and rejected (rating −1) images remain in the temporary catalog and are not copied to your editing workflow.