What do photographers use to cull photos? Let’s talk software for culling! Lightroom, Photo Mechanic and Aftershoot AI

What’s the best way to cull your photos?

As I’ve talked about before, the best practice as a photographer is to take the time early on to decide which photos are the best shots. Aka, before you start editing at all! Choosing what photos to deliver or edit as a photographer is called culling. There are lots of software options for culling, from the classic Adobe Lightroom to dedicated apps like Photo Mechanic and Aftershoot AI!

No matter what software or tech you’re using, there are some overall strategies you can (and should!) use to cull efficiently. You can click here to read more about culling methods that apply across the board, and combine those strategies with any of the workflow options we’ll talk about here.

If you’re curious about what the best software for culling your photography is, this is the article for you!

At a basic level, all a software needs to be able to do to work for culling is:

• Display photos (ideally quickly)
• Let you tag or rate photos in some way, so you can make note of what you want to keep.

Easy enough, and you can even do that within your camera. (Just make sure not to accidentally delete anything important!) But that said, not all culling software is made equal.

Assuming we’re talking digital images, there are two main camps for using software to cull your photos.

Some photographers like to do both culling and editing in one main program, like Adobe Lightroom. Capture One is also an option for this, but I’m primarily a Lightroom user so that’s what I’ll use as an example here! Other photographers prefer to do their culling in one app, and then go into an editing app like Lightroom later, importing only their culled images.

I’ve done both at different times, so let’s talk about what those different options can look like!

Can you cull in Lightroom?

Yes, you can! And many people do. While Adobe Lightroom isn’t a dedicated culling software, it is what most photographers use to manage and edit all their photos, and it can work really well for culling!

There are a few ways to approach culling photos in Lightroom. Let’s talk about my top two: the easy way, and the more complicated way that could be better in the long run.

Culling within Lightroom (the easy way, until it gets huge!)

When I first started being serious about culling all my photos before editing, I would import them all into Lightroom, and then go through all the images there.

I’d flag my favorite photos as “picks,” or use star ratings to mark my yeses and maybes, and then when I was finished culling, I would take all my favorite images and put them into a Lightroom collection. From there, I could look only at that Lightroom collection, and not be distracted by the other images I hadn’t chosen. But they were still there and already imported in case I realized I was missing something along the way!

If you’re already using Lightroom to edit your photos, this might be more or less what you’re doing already. And it definitely works!

There is sometimes a bit of a lag at the beginning while Lightroom processes your photo files, but you can get around that by selecting “build smart previews” when you import your photos, and giving Lightroom time to finish processing the previews before you start culling.

If you find yourself zooming in a lot to make decisions, you might also want to build 1:1 previews before starting. You can do that during import, too! Just select it in the “Build Previews” dropdown menu pictured above. But if you do, be aware that 1:1 previews take a lot longer to process, and they can take up a lot more hard drive space.

While this is a great way to get started, it may not be the fastest way to do things. And in my case, I ended up with so many photos in my Lightroom catalog that I never actually planned to edit. They were just taking up space!

If you go this route, I’d recommend removing the photos from Lightroom that didn’t make the cull. Just be extra careful to select “Remove From Lightroom” and not “Delete from Disk” when you remove them, unless you want those files in the trash and gone forever!

Keeping your Lightroom catalog streamlined by using… more catalogs!

If you don’t like having to remove photos from Lightroom once you’re done with culling, or if you struggle to keep up with the habit, one way to get around it is to use separate Lightroom catalogs. Some photographers like to have different catalogs for each project always! Personally, I like having one big catalog with all my work in it, but I do use separate catalogs for the projects I’m currently working on.

If you like having one main Lightroom catalog like me, you can still use a separate catalog for culling your project.

Once you choose your photos, put your selected images into a collection. Then go to the file menu and click “Export as Catalog.” Next, open your primary Lightroom catalog. Go to the file menu there and choose “Import from another Catalog.” Find the catalog you just exported, and Lightroom will import only your chosen photos! (And yes, you can delete those extra catalogs if you’re sure you won’t need them again.)

Although you’re still culling in Lightroom here, using a different catalog helps keep the culling process separate from your editing. Once you import your choices into your main catalog, they’ll be the only photos you’ll deal with from there on out!

Culling photos before importing into Lightroom: Software to try

If you take a lot of pictures, and you’re willing to invest in an extra app? Culling your photos somewhere else before you import them into Lightroom will change the game!

Eventually, I decided it was probably worth trying a separate culling software. And wow, I would highly recommend it! Now that process goes way faster for me, *and* I don’t have hundreds (*cough*, thousands) of extra photos clogging up my Lightroom catalog. I don’t import them at all! I do keep the extra files juuuust in case, but I don’t have to look at them once I’ve decided they’re not the best shots of the day.

Does Adobe have culling software?

Yes and no. If you have the Adobe Suite and you want to use that for culling, Adobe Lightroom is what I’d stick with for culling! Once you build smart previews (and 1:1 previews if you need to do a lot of zooming), it’s pretty fast. And it can be convenient to have everything in one place, as I mentioned earlier!

There is also a software called Adobe Bridge, which could work for this too. It’s built more as a file management app, and it can view folders beyond just what you have in your Lightroom catalog. It can also rename and move files, add tags, and edit metadata. And it’s free, which is a great bonus!

Free is hard to argue with, but if you’re looking to cull outside of Lightroom anyway and you’ve got the budget for a dedicated culling app, I’d consider opting for Photo Mechanic or Aftershoot AI instead of Bridge. That said, Adobe has continued to update Bridge and it’s been a while since I’ve really dug into it. So if you do try it out, please leave a comment and let me know how the experience was!

Photo Mechanic vs. Aftershoot AI

For a few years, I culled my photos exclusively in Photo Mechanic.

Photo Mechanic is very fast. If you’re coming from a Lightroom-only system, the first thing you’ll notice is that there’s no loading time for previews, and you can zoom in on details pretty much instantaneously! It’s also fantastic for all things organization. There are so many options for importing, organizing, renaming, and tagging your files!

Photographers who work in high-volume or high-speed photography fields, like journalism or stock photography, tend to especially love Photo Mechanic. That’s because in addition to everything mentioned above, it’s also really good with things like metadata and IPTC fields.

Recently, I’ve started using a combination of Photo Mechanic and Aftershoot AI.

Photo Mechanic is definitely more robust than Aftershoot when it comes to file management and tagging. It’s the industry standard for a reason! But apps like Aftershoot have been making waves in the last few years, and that’s because of how it leverages AI to make culling easier.

Aftershoot’s main advantage is its AI image recognition, and after using it for a couple of years now, I do think it makes a big difference! That said, it is not perfect. What it’s best at is grouping similar images together, and giving you more information about each photo than you’d normally be able to see without zooming in. But those two things alone can help you sort through your photos way more quickly!

For example, it can help you choose photos by the type of composition and lighting first, and then see what near-identical photos you have with that composition so you can choose the best one. It can also help you quickly see whether peoples’ faces are in focus, and whether their eyes are open, without having to zoom in and out quite so often!

As much as the AI is helpful, I would never recommend just trusting it without double checking.

Sometimes it doesn’t group images together quite right, and sometimes it’s wrong about one photo being more in focus than another one. And even after a couple of years using it, I still disagree with its choice of the best photo from a group of duplicates pretty regularly. I wouldn’t run a photo shoot through Aftershoot (or any AI culling service) and taking what it chooses without double checking. But it’s still a very useful tool, and one I’m happy to have!

P.S. If you do go with something like Aftershoot, you might want to know that it does AI-based editing too! I wouldn’t call it a one-and-done either, but it can save you a lot of time. I talk more about Aftershoot Edits and other ways to save time editing in this post if you’d like to know more.

Both of those options have great free trials, but after that they’re unfortunately both subscription-based. If you like the idea but they feel a little too pricy, you might want to look at FastRawViewer, too. It’s still a paid option after a free trial, but it’s cheaper and a one time payment.

Whichever way you go, pick what photos you’ll deliver first, and then only look at and edit those from then on. Trust yourself to make the right choices from the get go, even if you have to go through your shoot a few times to whittle it down.

I hope this helps you on your photography journey! Please let me know how you cull in the comments, or feel free to ask any questions you may have! And if you’d like more photography tips or resources, you can also check out my resource list for photographers!