CullKit
You bought a QNAP NAS because it holds your entire working library at a fraction of the cost per terabyte of cloud storage, and because the hardware is genuinely solid. A TS-464 with four drives in RAID 5 gives you a fast, redundant, always-online home for your RAW files that no external SSD can match for convenience. You can reach it from every device on your network. You can back it up automatically. You can share folders with a second shooter or a client.
Then you come home from a shoot with 1,600 frames and the culling problem hits you square on. Your QNAP, for all its storage capability, has no built-in way to help you cull and rate those frames - pick the 80 keepers from the pile before you ever open an editor.
That is the gap this guide fills. It covers the complete QNAP-specific culling workflow: setting up SMB access on QTS and QuTS hero, connecting CullKit to your Multimedia folder, configuring permissions and SMB tuning for speed, and handing your rated selects to Lightroom and Capture One via XMP sidecars - all without copying a single file off the NAS.
Why can’t QuMagie or the QNAP web UI cull or rate photos?
QuMagie is QNAP’s photo-management app, and it does what it was designed to do competently. It scans your Multimedia folder for new images, runs AI-powered face and subject detection, organises photos into albums by person, object, and location, and presents the result in a clean mobile and web interface. For a family photo library, it is a reasonable alternative to Google Photos that runs on hardware you own.
It is not a culling tool. QuMagie has no star-rating system. It has no reject flag. There is no gesture-driven review mode, no keep-or-discard decision loop, no auto-advance from one frame to the next after you decide. The closest it offers is a heart-shaped favourite button, which is binary - it tells you whether you liked a frame or not, not how much, and provides no way to separate a 5-star hero shot from a 3-star that stays in the album but will never be printed. There is also no XMP output. QuMagie keeps its metadata inside its own database on the NAS. Nothing travels to Lightroom. Nothing travels to Capture One. Your rating decisions stay locked inside QNAP’s ecosystem.
The QNAP web UI (QTS or QuTS hero desktop) is the same story from a different angle. File Station shows you a file list with thumbnails. You can sort by name, date, and file size. You cannot swipe through a full-screen review. You cannot assign a star rating. You cannot flag a reject. The web UI is a file manager, not a photo review station, and that distinction is the difference between an hour of clicking through files one by one and a fifteen-minute culling pass that produces rated, organised files ready for editing.
CullKit is an independent product. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by QNAP Technologies, Inc. It connects to QNAP NAS devices via the standard SMB protocol, the same way any other SMB client does. Compatibility claims only.
What does CullKit actually do?
CullKit is a dedicated culling and rating application. It browses, it rates, it flags, it tags, it colour-labels, and it organises. It does not edit images. It does not develop RAW files. It does not do face recognition, geolocation, or smart albums. Think of it as a dedicated first-pass tool that sits between your memory card and your desktop editor, and it does one thing as fast as the hardware will allow.
The interface is full-screen and gesture-driven on iPhone and iPad. Swipe right to mark a frame as a keeper. Swipe left to reject it. Tap a numbered star to assign a rating from one to five. A quick-access bar at the bottom of the screen carries colour labels, tags, shortcuts to neighbour folders, and a toggle to switch the swipe action between keep, reject, and rating modes. Auto-advance moves you to the next frame the moment your thumb lifts. On Mac, the same session runs from the keyboard: number keys set star ratings, P picks, X rejects, the zero key clears, and arrow keys step through the sequence.
A culling session has three phases: scope - choose to review all frames in the folder, only unrated frames, or a filtered subset by minimum rating or colour label, rate - the main swipe or key pass where you make decisions frame by frame, and batch review - a final confirmation grid where you see your rated selects together and can correct any mistake before metadata is written. At session end, CullKit writes every star rating, flag, colour label, and tag into XMP sidecar files alongside your RAW files on the QNAP share. RAW and JPEG pairs share a single sidecar, following the Lightroom convention, so paired files are never double-rated.
The free tier lets you browse your library and inspect images at full resolution. The Pro tier unlocks the full culling, rating, XMP writing, and file-organise feature set, with a seven-day free trial, then a monthly or yearly subscription. See the pricing page for current details.
How do I connect CullKit to my QNAP Multimedia folder?
Your QNAP NAS exposes every shared folder over SMB, the standard local-network file-sharing protocol. Windows, macOS, iOS, and every Linux distribution speak SMB natively. CullKit connects the same way: it opens the SMB share and browses your folder structure directly. Nothing is copied to a staging location. Nothing is uploaded. Your photos stay where they are, on your QNAP, on your network.
Here is the step-by-step for QNAP:
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Confirm SMB is running. Open your QNAP’s admin interface. In QTS, go to Control Panel > Network & File Services > Win/Mac/NFS/WebDAV and verify Enable SMB service is ticked. In QuTS hero the path is the same. QNAP supports SMB 2 and SMB 3. Leave the maximum protocol at SMB 3 for performance, encryption, and large-MTU support.
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Identify your photo share. QNAP creates a default shared folder called Multimedia during initial setup. This is where QuMagie looks for photos by default, and it is usually the right target for culling. If you created a custom share for your RAW working library, for example a share named
raw-shootsorphotography, use that instead. Note the share name exactly as it appears in Control Panel > Privilege > Shared Folders. -
Find your NAS address. Open Control Panel > System > Network & Virtual Switch and note the NAS IP address, something like
192.168.1.20. For a local-network connection, the IP address or the NAS hostname (for examplets464.local) both work. For access from outside your home network, QNAP’s myQNAPcloud service provides a DDNS address, though SMB over a VPN is the more secure and faster option for remote culling. -
Connect from CullKit. Open CullKit on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Add a new connection, choose SMB, and enter the path:
smb://192.168.1.20/Multimedia. The format issmb://<NAS-IP>/<share-name>. Enter the QNAP username and password you use to log into the admin interface. The account needs read/write permission on the Multimedia share (set in Control Panel > Privilege > Shared Folders > Multimedia > Permissions). -
Browse and cull. CullKit loads your folder tree from the share. Navigate to your shoot folder, tap to open it, and start a culling session. The connection is saved in the device Keychain, so next time you tap the share name and you are browsing immediately.
QNAP path format: \\<NAS-IP>\Multimedia on Windows, smb://<NAS-IP>/Multimedia on Apple platforms.
How do I configure QNAP SMB for the fastest photo culling?
Culling large RAW files over a network means every millisecond of SMB latency adds up across hundreds of frames. A few QNAP settings make a measurable difference.
SMB protocol version. In Control Panel > Network & File Services > Win/Mac/NFS/WebDAV, under the SMB tab, ensure the highest SMB protocol is set to SMB 3. SMB 3 adds multichannel support, encryption, and better throughput on modern clients. If your NAS is an older ARM-based model (TS-x31 series or earlier), SMB 2 may be the maximum; leave it there.
Enable asynchronous I/O. On the same SMB settings page, find Advanced Options and enable Asynchronous I/O. This lets the SMB service handle multiple read requests in parallel, which matters when CullKit pre-loads previews for the next few frames while you are still rating the current one.
Leave oplocks enabled. Opportunistic locking lets clients cache file metadata locally, which speeds up directory listings and thumbnail loading. Under the SMB advanced settings, verify Enable oplocks is on. This is the default and it should stay that way.
Jumbo frames (optional, wired only). If your QNAP and your culling device (Mac with Ethernet, or iPad on a wired dock) both sit on the same switch, and that switch supports 9,000-byte MTU, enable jumbo frames under Control Panel > Network & Virtual Switch > Adapter settings. This reduces per-packet overhead on large file transfers. Do not enable jumbo frames on a Wi-Fi connection or across a router that does not support them - mismatched MTU settings cause the connection to fragment, which is slower than leaving it at default.
Static IP. A DHCP lease renewal can change your NAS IP address in the middle of a session, which breaks the connection. Assign the QNAP a static IP under Control Panel > Network & Virtual Switch > Configure > IPv4. Pick an address outside your router’s DHCP pool range. Write it down; you will type it exactly once into CullKit’s connection screen.
Dedicated NIC for culling (advanced, multi-port models). QNAP models with two or more Ethernet ports (TS-664, TS-873A, TVS-h874) can dedicate one port to SMB traffic. Put the NAS and your culling Mac on a separate VLAN or a point-to-point cable, and point CullKit at that interface’s IP. Full-resolution 45MP RAW previews load as fast as they would from a directly attached SSD.
These settings are SMB-level, not CullKit-level. CullKit benefits from them the same way any SMB client does. The result is that your first-pass cull feels as responsive on the NAS as it would on a local folder.
What is the QNAP Multimedia folder structure and how should I organise it for culling?
QNAP’s Multimedia folder has a default internal structure worth understanding before you point a culling app at it, because the structure affects how QuMagie indexes your files and how CullKit presents your shoot folders.
The Multimedia folder sits at the root of the NAS volume, typically at the path /share/Multimedia (QTS) or /share/ZFS<number>/Multimedia (QuTS hero). Inside it, QNAP expects photos organised into subfolders. QuMagie scans this entire tree looking for new images. The convention most QNAP owners adopt is Multimedia/photos/<year>/<month>/<shoot-name> or simply Multimedia/<shoot-name>. Both work with CullKit because CullKit reads the real folder tree; it does not need a specific naming convention or a database of what is where.
A culling-friendly structure organises by shoot, not by date algorithm alone. Folder names that describe the job give you one-click access from CullKit’s folder browser: 2026-07-14-Smith-Wedding, 2026-07-18-Headshots-Patel, 2026-07-22-Travel-Tokyo-Day-3. This matters because CullKit shows the folder tree as a searchable, scrollable list. The faster you can find your shoot, the faster you start culling.
If your current Multimedia folder is a flat dump of thousands of unsorted photos, spend ten minutes on the structure before you start culling. Create a shoots subfolder inside Multimedia. Inside that, add one folder per job with the date and a keyword in the name. Move existing photos into the right job folders using File Station or Finder. This is a one-time exercise, and it means every culling session from then on starts with a single tap on the correct job folder.
QNAP is not prescriptive about folder layout, unlike Synology Photos which expects photos inside the photo share. CullKit simply reads whichever folder you point it at, so you can organise the Multimedia tree however suits your workflow.
How does the culling session work on a QNAP NAS?
Once you have pointed CullKit at your QNAP shoot folder, the actual culling session is identical in feel to culling a local folder. The app streams full-resolution previews from the NAS on demand. You see one frame at a time, full-screen, with rating controls overlaid.
Pass one: fast reject. Open the session scoped to all frames. Swipe left on blinks, motion-blurred frames, test shots, near-duplicate burst pairs, and anything technically unsalvageable. This pass is fast because you are not evaluating composition or light - you are removing frames that will never make the final cut. On a 1,600-frame wedding folder, this pass takes ten to fifteen minutes and cuts the set roughly in half.
Pass two: star rating. Switch the session scope to unrated only (the app auto-filters the frames you already rejected). Now swipe right on keepers and tap the star you think each frame deserves. Your thumb settles into a rhythm: swipe left to drop, tap three to mark good-but-not-hero, tap five for the frame you know the client will want. Auto-advance carries you forward immediately after each decision.
Pass three: batch review. Before the session writes metadata, CullKit shows you a grid of your rated selects. You can replay any frame, change a rating, or re-reject something that looked better on the small screen. This is the quality-control step. When you are satisfied, confirm the batch, and CullKit writes XMP sidecars for every rated frame back to the QNAP share.
For a wedding photographer working on a TS-464 over a wired gigabit connection, a complete three-pass session on 1,600 frames finishes in roughly forty minutes end to end. For a travel photographer culling a week’s worth of images on an iPad over Wi-Fi, the same workflow takes about an hour.
How do my ratings get into Lightroom or Capture One after culling?
CullKit writes every star rating, reject flag, colour label, and tag into an XMP sidecar file: a small, human-readable XML document named IMG_1234.xmp that sits next to IMG_1234.RAW in your QNAP folder. XMP is the Extensible Metadata Platform, an open standard published by Adobe and used by every major photo editor. Lightroom, Capture One, Darktable, and dozens of other tools read standard XMP sidecars without any special configuration.
After you finish a culling session on your QNAP, open the same shoot folder in Lightroom. If the folder is already in your catalogue, select it and choose Library > Synchronize Folder or Metadata > Read Metadata from Files. Lightroom scans the directory, finds the XMP sidecars, and applies the star ratings, flags, and labels to the corresponding images. Your picks are marked for editing. Your rejects are flagged. Your five-star hero frames are waiting at the top of the filter.
In Capture One, the same sidecars are read when you import the QNAP folder into a session or catalogue. In Darktable, the sidecar import is automatic. Because XMP is an open standard, your ratings survive in the folder regardless of which editor you use today or what you switch to in the future. Copy the folder to a backup drive, send it to a retoucher, archive it for five years, and the ratings stay with the files.
RAW and JPEG pairs share a single XMP sidecar. If you shot RAW+JPEG and both files sit in the same folder, CullKit shows them as one frame during culling and writes one sidecar that applies to both. This follows the Lightroom convention for paired files, so if you later import the same folder into Lightroom, the paired JPEGs do not duplicate your ratings or create a conflict.
Can I cull my QNAP library when I am away from home?
Yes, but the approach depends on your remote-access setup. CullKit connects over SMB, which is a local-network protocol. To reach your QNAP SMB share from outside your home network, you need a way to tunnel the SMB traffic securely.
The most reliable option is a VPN server running on your QNAP itself. QNAP ships a QVPN Service app that can run as a WireGuard or OpenVPN server. Enable it in App Center, configure a client profile, install the matching client on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac, and connect to the VPN before opening CullKit. Once the VPN tunnel is up, your culling device behaves as though it is on the home network. Open CullKit, tap your saved SMB connection, and you are browsing your Multimedia folder from a hotel, a client’s office, or an airport lounge.
QNAP’s myQNAPcloud service provides an alternative via its CloudLink feature, which sets up a relay between your device and the NAS without requiring a VPN. However, CloudLink is optimised for file-browser-style access, not for the sustained, high-throughput connection that streaming RAW previews demands. A VPN running on the NAS gives you a direct tunnel with lower latency and higher throughput than a relay service, so it is the better option for remote culling.
On your home network, use the local IP address or the NAS hostname (ts464.local) for the fastest connection. This skips any relay or VPN, cuts latency to sub-millisecond, and gives you the best culling experience the hardware can provide.
QNAP NAS culling vs. QuMagie: which should I use for what?
QuMagie and CullKit serve different purposes, and a QNAP photographer gets the most value from both by using them in sequence: CullKit for the first-pass triage and rating, QuMagie for browsing and sharing the finished library.
| Task | QuMagie | CullKit |
|---|---|---|
| Browse photo library | Yes, with AI face/subject/object sorting | Yes, grid and folder-tree browse |
| Star-rate photos (1-5) | No | Yes (Pro) |
| Flag rejects | No | Yes (Pro) |
| Full-screen swipe culling | No | Yes (Pro) |
| Colour labels (Lightroom palette) | No | Yes (Pro) |
| Write XMP sidecars | No | Yes (Pro) |
| Hand-off to Lightroom/Capture One | No, metadata stays in QuMagie database | Yes, via XMP sidecars on the NAS share |
| Face and subject recognition | Yes | No |
| Timeline and map views | Yes | No |
| Share albums with family/clients | Yes | No |
| Organise files on disk (move, date-sort) | Limited | Yes (Pro) |
The workflow that makes the most sense: cull and rate your shoot in CullKit, writing XMP sidecars to the QNAP Multimedia folder. Then let QuMagie index the folder as it normally would. QuMagie picks up the new images, applies its AI tags, and adds them to your timeline and people albums. Your ratings are already embedded in the sidecars. If someone else browses the same folder from a different machine, your ratings travel with the files. The two tools complement each other because they do not compete for the same job.
Troubleshooting QNAP SMB connections for photo culling
A few issues come up consistently with QNAP SMB connections, and most have a quick fix.
“Connection refused” or host not found. The SMB service is either disabled or the IP address is wrong. Check Control Panel > Network & File Services > Win/Mac/NFS/WebDAV and confirm the SMB service is running. Verify the IP address under Control Panel > System > Network & Virtual Switch. If the NAS IP changed due to a DHCP lease rotation, assign a static IP and update your CullKit connection address.
Credentials prompt won’t accept your login. The QNAP account you entered either has the wrong password or lacks permission on the target shared folder. Test the credentials in File Station or Finder first: on a Mac, open Finder, press Command-K, and try to connect to smb://<NAS-IP>/Multimedia with the same username and password. If Finder rejects it, CullKit will too. Check the account permissions under Control Panel > Privilege > Shared Folders > Multimedia > Permissions and add your user with read/write access.
SMB connection works but the folder appears empty. The QNAP account has access to the share but not to the specific subfolder. Under the Multimedia share permissions, make sure the user has read/write set to apply to all subfolders and files, not just the share root. On QuTS hero, also check the ZFS dataset ACL: open Storage & Snapshots, select the share’s dataset, and verify the user appears under Properties > Permission.
RAW previews are slow to appear. Large RAWs (45MP and above, uncompressed) over Wi-Fi will load slowly regardless of SMB tuning. Switch to a wired gigabit connection for the culling device, or move the culling Mac/iPad to 5GHz Wi-Fi with clear line-of-sight to the access point. On the NAS side, a wired connection from the QNAP to the router is mandatory. If the QNAP uses Wi-Fi to connect to the network, culling performance drops to an unusable level.
Some files will not open or show a placeholder. The file format may be unsupported. Most common RAW formats render (Canon CR2/CR3, Nikon NEF, Sony ARW, Fujifilm RAF, Panasonic RW2, and recent Leica, Olympus, and Pentax formats). Very new or proprietary camera RAWs may need a CullKit update. JPEG, HEIC, HEIF, PNG, common video formats, and Live Photos all render natively. If a specific format is critical to your workflow and does not render, report it.
The NAS goes to sleep mid-session. QNAP drives can spin down on an inactivity timer. Disable disk standby during culling sessions. In Control Panel > System > Hardware > General, set Enable disk standby mode to a longer interval or disable it temporarily. A culling session holds a persistent SMB connection that keeps the share alive, but individual disk spindown can cause sub-second pauses when a frame loads from a spun-down platter.
Why does a local-only culling workflow matter on a QNAP?
You bought a QNAP NAS to own your storage. You did not buy it to become dependent on a cloud service that charges monthly for the privilege of accessing your own files. A local-only culling workflow respects that choice.
CullKit processes everything locally. Your photos never leave your network. Ratings and sidecars are written to the QNAP share directly, over SMB, using the same protocol the NAS was built to serve. Credentials are stored in the device Keychain. There is no intermediate server, no cloud processing, no library upload, no additional subscription for storage you already own. The free tier lets you browse your full library at full resolution without spending anything. When you switch to Pro, you are paying for the culling, rating, and XMP-writing features, not for storage or bandwidth.
For a working photographer with terabytes of RAW files on a QNAP, a cloud-first culling app would mean uploading the whole library before you can rate a single frame. That defeats the point of running a NAS. CullKit meets your library where it lives and leaves it there. More detail on the privacy model is in the FAQ.
Related reading
- Culling Photos from a QNAP, TrueNAS, or UGREEN NAS - the broader SMB culling guide covering all three NAS brands with per-vendor setup steps.
- The Best Way to Rate Photos on a NAS - comparing every option for rating on a NAS, from Lightroom Catalogue to sidecar-based workflows.
- Get Your Culls into Lightroom Without Re-Importing - a deeper look at how XMP sidecars carry your ratings to your desktop editor.
CullKit runs on iPhone, iPad, and Mac (Apple platforms only; no Android or Windows). A demo mode lets you try the full culling workflow on sample data before connecting any NAS.
Browse is free. The Pro subscription (seven-day free trial, then monthly or yearly) unlocks culling, star ratings, XMP metadata, move, and delete. Download CullKit on the App Store.