8 Best Free Photo Culling Software for Windows and Mac in 2024
You may use the best photo culling software for photographers shared in this article to select and deliver top-notch photos to your clients quickly and easily.
In the social media race to look stunning in every photograph, a single click satisfies no one. People often snap multiple photos from thousands of angles and varied poses to put the best foot forward on their social networking platform. These photo sessions are fun for clients, but without photo-culling software, they may become a headache for a photographer.
You must be wondering why right? Well, the reason is simple. Almost every client desires to get those images that look as impressive as they can be. Hence, they demand the photographer select the best photos from a pool of pictures and further refine them through editing.
This entire process of selecting the perfect photo is technically called culling. Now, as a photographer, imagine yourself sitting in front of a computer screen that has over 1000 pictures and choosing, let us say, the top 100 from them. Sounds too exhausting, right? Well, that is why photography culling software comes into the picture.
Now, before we dig deeper into the top photo culling software you may use, let us first throw some more light on “after shoot photo culling.” If you have a clear picture of what it exactly means to cull photos, you will be in a better position to select the best software to do it. Hence, the following section talks about the same.
What is Photo Culling
By now, you may already have a slight idea of what photo culling means. To define it a bit more technically, it is a process of streamlining the process of eliminating the poor quality images, selecting the best pictures to reduce the editing time, and delivery of the perfect results to the clients in a much lesser time.
So, above, we got a precise definition of photo culling. Now, let us look at some good photo-culling software we handpicked for our readers and everyone who needs them.
Top Photo Culling Software in 2024 (Windows and Mac)
If you are looking for the best photo culling software to select the most impressive pictures to edit for and quickly deliver to your clients, you may try the below programs.
1. Photo Mechanic
Let us first look at one of the most popular photo culling software, particularly in the wildlife/sports photographers’ community. Support for RAW images from multiple memory cards simultaneously is among the top features that make the Photo Mechanic outshine many other programs on this list.
Moreover, below are some other features that add more jewels to the Photo Mechanic’s best culling software for photographers’ crown.
Key features of Photo Mechanic
- Quick viewing, selection, and organization of photos
- Addition of keywords, copyright details, and titles to pictures
- Watermark overlaying on photos
- Automatic addition of names of states/cities/countries via GPS coordinates
Also Read: Best Free Photo Slideshow Software For Windows
2. Adobe Lightroom
How can we forget Adobe Lightroom, it is impossible to skip its name when discussing the top photo-culling software. It boasts some of the most impressive features, such as flags or flowers for good or bad quality photographs.
Apart from this, below is why Adobe Lightroom is among our top choices of the best photo culling software.
Key features of Adobe Lightroom
- Option to rate images from 0 to 5 to cull them easily
- Support for a Canon plug-in for photo culling (it selects photos according to parameters like sharpness, closed/red eyes, etc.)
- Smart previews with many shortcut keys and a library module to cull quickly
- Availability of many options to add keywords, tags, labels, and metadata
- Photoshop comes bundled with the Adobe Lightroom package
3. FilterPixel
FilterPixel proves to be a good culling software for photographers due to its AI-based powers. It uses artificial intelligence to automatically select the best pictures and discard the out-of-focus or bad-quality images.
Moreover, below are the other reasons we like FilterPixel as a photography culling software.
Key features of FilterPixel
- Culling over a thousand photos in just a minute with the AI power
- Lets you be in charge of photo selection and metadata
- Availability of image syncing with Adobe Lightroom and other editors
- Your RAW files remain intact
- AI sliders to quickly drag to the sharpest photos
- Faceviews to see faces without zooming the picture
4. AfterShoot
Here is another software that claims to have made photo culling easy. And we think it really is a good program for its automatic detection of duplicate images, blurry photos, out-of-focus, and photos with closed human eyes.
In addition to this, below are some other AfterShoot features you should be aware of.
Key features of AfterShoot
- You can run AfterShoot locally on your computer
- It gives complete control over the culling process
- Easy reviewing and editing of the sections this software makes
- Support for all photo formats, such as PNG, RAW, and JPEG
- User-friendly photo culling software
Also Read: Best Photo Stitching Software
5. ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate
Now, let us talk about ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate. It is not only the best photo culling software but an entire package you need to deliver top-notch photos to your clients.
With ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate, you can perform multilevel photo editing, sort different photos quickly, and execute a lot of other actions. Moreover, the below features make this software a good photo culling software.
Key features of ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate
- Batch processing of photos
- Easy addition of keywords
- Integration with cloud storage
- One-click switching between images
- DAM tools to organize photos
- Geo-tagging of images
- Option to view pictures in a tree view mode
6. Exposure Software
Next, we have Exposure Software as one of the top photo culling software. Features like hotkey support to select photos make this program a part of this list.
Moreover, the following factors also contribute to making Exposure Software a great photography culling software.
Key features of Exposure Software
- Selecting an image lets you view the next photo automatically
- Option to hide the unwanted photos completely
- Marking of photos with starts and rating them on a scale of 1 to 5
- Color marks for classifying the pictures quickly
- Side-by-side comparison of photos
- Both manual and automatic lens correction options
- Support for image editing and layers
- Image enlargement for a detailed comparison of fine details
- Support for Photoshop and Lightroom plugins
7. Narrative Select (Only for Mac)
Finally, we have Narrative Select as the best free photo culling software. We got attracted to this program for its close-up option (which gives you a closer look at the image faces for quicker and easy rating), AI tool for photo assessment, and color-coded quality-related warnings on images.
Additionally, the following features are also a reason to call Narrative Select one of the best AI photo culling software.
Key features of Narrative Select
- Easy elimination of closed-eye and out-of-focus images for quick culling
- Zoom to face and standard zoom for one-tap zooming in and out of image faces
- Single click Lightroom image imports
- Color coding of images according to categories like fully closed eyes, partially closed eyes, etc.
- Support for formats like CRW, NRW, CR2, etc.
8. BreezeBrowser Pro
For those of you still wondering if there is another best free photo culling software, yes there is. BreezeBrowser Pro is an amazing culling software. The tool is not free to download and use, however, the paid version offers a lot of culling features. You can get the trial offer of the tool and try it out before making a purchase.
Key features of BreezeBrowser Pro
- Support for formats like CRW, CR2, etc.
- Works on both Windows and Mac
- Contact sheets and strips
- See images in black and white, and play with color.
- Annotate images
Also Read: Best Photo/Image Viewers for Windows
Concluding the Best Photo Culling Software
This article discussed the top commercially available and free photo culling software for Mac and Windows. You may study their features to pick the program that fits your requirements rightly.
However, before you jump into photo culling with any of these programs, remember the best approach to cull photos. According to experts, you should first cull photos, edit them, and then add metadata (many above software offer a metadata addition tool) to revisit the images easily.
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