The worst part about being a wedding or event photographer is having to edit thousands of photos, but I've recently discovered Narrative Select, software that uses AI to make the culling process much faster.
Narrative Select isn't photo editing software, it's dedicated only to one thing: weeding out the bad images and keeping the good ones. Narrative Select will help cull through your photos as quickly as possible and then import selected photos into the editing software of your choice.
Narrative Select can import over 5,000 raw files in approximately three seconds, and there is no additional loading or preview-building time. Using artificial intelligence, it recognizes faces and looks for blurry images and blinks. The software will automatically warn you if it sees a problem with an image and will zoom into each face in a shot so that you can quickly check expressions without having to pan around an image. In my test, the software was able to detect when subjects were kissing or "posing" and would not add warnings in these instances for closed eyes.
You can then quickly move through images, rating them as you would in other software and filtering out images based on software or user ratings. Once you're finished, simply export the best images out to the editor of your choice.
The best aspect of Narrative Select is that for most users, it will be 100% free. Currently, you can use the software for six projects a month without paying anything. For unlimited usage, you can either pay $18/month or $150/year.
Perhaps the biggest problem currently with Narrative Select is that it is only available for MacOS, but it appears that a Windows version may be in development. If you're an interested Windows user, sign up here, and they will send you an update if the software becomes available.
What if there are no good photos
You get your money back!
(free version only)
I ran about 3500 fashion week images through this, and, it was pretty good, actually. But, like most "AI" selections, not a bad idea to trust but verify.
What I liked:
-- As I'm going through the images, there's an optional panel where it's zoomed on the face(s).
-- I can group similarly taken images together (they call it "scenes") so I can pick the best of the bunch.
What I didn't like:
-- It's somewhat inconsistent on how much the zoomed panel zooms on the faces. Sometimes, 100%, sometimes, way less.
-- It's too liberal on what it considers in focus. It'd be awesome if there was a way to fine tune that.
-- Not available on Windows.
You can laugh at it now. But it's not too hard to foresee this kind of photo-cull software doing its job better. Then doing it in real-time. Then being able to evaluate the environment and predict how to position the camera to get a "better" shot.
You can call me a pessimist but I believe it is a good time for photographers to start considering new professions.
The funny thing is, those who shout the loudest about how gear is never good or advanced enough, they will 100% be the first in line to scream about the profession being wiped out by AI. Gearheads are their own worst enemy.
The exact same thing applies to DJing, all these little scrotes kicking about now who want all this automation like beat sync and even colours on screen to tell them when vocals start etc (what happened to being passionate about music and learning your tracks) just so they can stand behind the decks soaking up all the attention with the least amount of effort applied to learning the craft.... they will be the ones crying when a bar or club installs an AI system to pick the music and mix it, meaning their moment in the spotlight is no more. People think its nowhere near, but how far away are we from a computer being able to recognise the average age group or a crowd reaction then apply its algorithm to change the music.
Bummer, it wouldn't download on my iMac...says it's not supported and Safari couldn't open it...probably because I have not upgraded my iMac to the new operating system which I hear has terrible reviews...Monterrey is not what they say it is.