How to cull faster with AfterShoot

One of the most tedious and un-fun jobs in photography is culling a massive photoshoot with many similar images. AfterShoot, an AI-based culling tool, aims to make this process painless, and … dare I say, fun?

What is culling?

Culling is the process of sorting your best images — the ones you want to edit and share — from those that will be archived or discarded.

Manual culling is slow

In the past, I manually culled my photos in Lightroom Classic. Each photo was examined one-by-one, then I would add a flag for picks (ones I wanted to edit or take a closer look at) and rejects (photos that should be trashed).

For a series with several similar shots, I’d bring up the compare view and zoom in to see which one(s) were in focus, if eyes were closed, which had the best expressions, etc. 

Culling with AI in AfterShoot

Using AI technology in AfterShoot dramatically speeds up the culling process. I simply load a folder of images into the app and tell it to start culling. When it is finished I’m presented with a sorted list of my photos ranging from the best 5-star photos to ones that are blurry or have eyes closed and need to be discarded.

For example, I loaded up a folder of 73 photos I captured of Michaela. I let AfterShoot do its magic and it presented me with 25 of the best images from the shoot that have now been marked with 4 and 5 stars.

Double click on any photo to see a larger view. You can change the star rating and color label the app has assigned and take a look at any images that AfterShoot has detected as visually similar duplicates. 

Once you’ve sorted through AfterShoot’s selected images, click the Export button. You can choose to export your batch directly to Lightroom Classic, Lightroom (cloud), Capture One or to a folder.

I like exporting to my source folder. AfterShoot creates industry-standard XMP files for my images that can be read by a variety of image organization applications such as Lightroom Classic, Capture One, Mylio and others.

Now that my images have been sorted and rated, I’m ready to jump into editing and sharing my photos. AfterShoot did a great job helping me find the best images in my collection and saved me quite a bit of time. AI technology doesn’t replace you or your eye, but it does take care of the heavy lifting enabling me to spend time on things I like more, like editing or getting back out behind the camera.