Spend Less Time Culling With the Help of AI

Depending on how many photoshoots you've had, or how long the event was for, you could end up with an abundance of photos to cull through. What if you could use artificial intelligence to help you speed through culling your photos?

In this video, Daniel Inskeep from Mango Street shares a newly developed app that uses AI to help reduce your time culling those batches of photos. The application is available for both Windows and Mac computers with a free option, which limits each shoot to 100 photos. If you need more photos per shoot, the Pro version is only $99.99.

Adobe Lightroom is known to be sluggish, but by using the Optyx app, you can quickly cull your shots and select your favorites before importing the photos into your Lightroom catalog. Check out the video to see some of the different specifications to have the built-in AI help rate and select your final photos. If you are finding your current program too slow to use when culling, you can give Optyx a try and manually cull your shots without the aid of AI. 

When it comes down to it, culling is one of my least favorite tasks to do, especially when software can make the process take even longer. What program do you use to cull your shots? Would you use AI to help reduce time culling? 

Alex Ventura's picture

Staff writer Alex Ventura is a professional photographer based out of the Houston area that specializes in automotive and glamour with the occasional adventures into other genres. He regularly covers automotive related events for Houston Streets & Spekture with some publications in the United States.

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13 Comments

Not disclosed, one Photo mechanic license can be used on 3 different devices so it's basically 46.66. Also photo mechanic does more than just culling. You should have included that little bit of info.

Hiya Grant! Optyx founder here 👋

Optyx can be installed on as many devices as you want so long as you're the individual user, so if we're dividing by 3 I guess one could say Optyx is basically $33 ;)

I'm not talking about Optyx, im talking about PM and the number of installs was conveniently not mentioned.

Then this....it's free but we want your data.

Hiya Grant! Optyx founder here 👋

Sorry this prompt made you uncomfortable! I really don't want your data :) No photos ever leave your device, we never see them, nor do we want to, we don't sell or share the usage statistics with anyone. Is there a different phrasing for collecting how often different features are used that would've made this less greedy-sounding? I'd happily accept a lower opt-in rate for more comfort.

Why stop there? How about an AI module in camera preventing you from taking a "bad" photo in the first place? No culling needed. What a brave new world it will be.

Awesome!! Half of instagram gone! 😎

This guy is a joke. He claims photomechanic is $140 and that you can get "Optyx" for "Free". The browsing is nowhere near as snappy as Photomechanic and even stutters in the video. It also doesn't seem to have any captioning, ftp. variables etc.

Optyx has a lot of fairy dust that are impractical in the real world. PM allows superfast culling and tagging. I would pay $20 if Optyx could do one thing: weed out all the out of focus images from an assignment.

I can definitely "rationalize the purchase on a utility" when it comes to PM. Actually, calling PM a utility is insulting. PM has been the cornerstone of my workflow since 2004 and smokes this lame attempt at dethroning PM.

It is a very good idea, however, after 10 mins of use, I fell like this is still an early beta, for just 50 photos, It marks an "eye closed" shoot as the "best shot", and it is missing a lot of the good shots, which are marked as 0 stars.

Anyway, long ways to go, but it is a good starting point, and a very good idea, We can't afford to miss the best shot for the session. If it is reliable, this is a lifesaver, I may test it again next year, may possibly improve by then.

Hiya Penn! Optyx founder here 👋Thanks for the feedback! Sorry you had a rough experience.

We'd love to hear more about what you saw if you're willing to share at feedback@optyx.app and hope you'll give us another try in the future sometime :)

I've never seen/heard of anyone taking a dump on PhotoMechnic. PM alone is one of the best software purchases I have ever, ever made.

What's the hype with A.I.? AI can't judge neither your feelings nor the gist in your pictures. It is no real substitute for you while selecting the fitting photos.

The whole industry seems intent on shifting the effort of doing the job elsewhere

Culling is all about carefully curating a whole set, that work together. No algorithm will know the story or intent

I shoot with editing in mind, meaning for example a shot could be radically underexposed, knowing I'm going to merge the hilights from that shot to another

If you work in visual arts, be artists and do (create, use effort) your own work

Secondly, I do post a mortem on failures in the Culling process... It informs me shot by shot what went right and wrong, and why