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Skip the Laptop: Cull Your Shoot Before You Sit Down

By Ingo D ·

You finish a shoot and you are holding a memory card with two thousand frames. Every photographer knows what comes next: you sit down at your laptop, copy the card, import into Lightroom, wait for previews to generate, and then start the cull. The import alone can take twenty minutes on a large shoot. The cull takes another hour. And it all begins with sitting down.

The laptop has become the default culling station because that is where the tools have always been. But culling before you ever open your laptop changes every part of your post-shoot workflow. It moves the slowest, most repetitive job off your desk and into the gaps in your day: the train home, the sofa, the cafe while you wait for a client call. When you do sit down at your computer, your keepers are already picked and your ratings are waiting in your editor, written to XMP sidecar files by CullKit on your phone or tablet.

Why is the laptop the slowest place to begin a cull?

The laptop is where the editing happens, but it is the wrong starting point for a cull. Three things make it slow.

First, the import. Lightroom and Capture One build full-quality previews for every frame you import, including frames you will reject immediately: blinks, misfires, the fourth near-identical frame in a burst. On two thousand RAW files from a wedding or an event, that is fifteen to twenty-five minutes of waiting before you can make a single decision.

Second, the desk. Even with keyboard shortcuts (P to pick, X to reject), you are spending an hour at the same screen you will edit on. The cull is a decision-making task, not a rendering task. It does not need a calibrated monitor or a graphics tablet. It needs speed and a clear head. Doing it at the desk puts it right next to editing in your mental queue, and it always loses that fight.

Third, the metadata trap. Lightroom stores ratings inside its catalogue. If you rate inside Lightroom and then want those ratings visible in Capture One, Darktable, or a colleague’s Lightroom catalogue, they do not follow. You rate inside a walled garden. CullKit writes directly to XMP sidecars (Lightroom-compatible files that sit alongside your RAW frames on disk) so every tool that respects XMP picks the ratings up.

What does “cull before you sit down” actually mean?

It means reordering the traditional post-shoot workflow so that the culling decision happens independently of the import step. Instead of importing everything, culling at the desk, and then editing the survivors, you cull on any device, import only the keepers, and edit immediately.

Here is what that looks like in practice:

  1. Transfer your memory cards once. After the shoot, copy everything to your NAS, an external SSD, or a working folder on your Mac. This is a one-time file copy with no preview generation and no catalogue creation.

  2. Cull on your iPhone or iPad. Open CullKit on the device you carry with you. Connect to the NAS over Wi-Fi, read the SSD through USB-C, or browse the local folder on your Mac over the network. Swipe through the shoot at full screen: right to keep, left to reject, tap to star-rate. You are making decisions at two to three seconds per frame, the same speed as keyboard culling at the desk, but on a device you can use anywhere.

  3. Finish the session to write sidecars. When you complete the culling pass, CullKit writes XMP sidecar files alongside every rated frame on your NAS, your SSD, or your local drive. The rejected frames stay where they are, unrated. Nothing is moved, nothing is uploaded to a cloud, and nothing is locked inside a proprietary format.

  4. Open Lightroom or Capture One on your laptop. Import the folder. Your star ratings, reject flags, colour labels, and tags are already there, picked up from the sidecars automatically. Filter to your keepers, skip the rejects, and start editing.

CullKit is an independent product. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Synology Inc., QNAP Technologies, Inc., TrueNAS / iXsystems, UGREEN Group, or Adobe (Lightroom). It connects via standard protocols: SMB for NAS shares, Synology Photos API for Synology devices, and local file access for folders and SSDs.

How does culling on an iPhone compare to an iPad?

Both work, but they suit different rhythms.

The iPhone is the culling device you always have with you. If you transfer cards to a NAS after a shoot, you can cull from your phone on the train home, in the car while your partner drives, or in a cafe before your next appointment. The screen is smaller, but the swipe gesture is natural and fast. For a quick first pass that rejects the obvious discards (blinks, missed focus, accidental shutter), the iPhone is ideal. You move through frames at swipe speed, and the next time you are at your computer, the rejects are already marked.

The iPad gives you a larger display and makes it easier to judge sharpness, exposure, and composition during the culling pass. You can use the iPad at a standing desk, propped on a studio stand, or handheld on the sofa. The full-screen swipe works the same way, but the larger canvas lets you add star ratings and colour labels with more confidence during the second pass.

Both devices write the same XMP sidecars to the same location. You can start a session on your phone and finish it on your iPad. The choice is about screen size and where you happen to be when you have time to cull.

Where do my photos need to live for this to work?

CullKit is storage-neutral. It works with four types of photo storage on an iPhone or iPad:

  • Synology NAS (Synology Photos). Connect via QuickConnect ID or local IP address. Browse your Personal Space, Shared Space, and Albums. CullKit reads from Synology Photos and writes ratings to both the Synology database and XMP sidecars on the NAS. This gives you in-app browsing structured the way you already organise your Synology library, with portable metadata for Lightroom.

  • Any NAS over SMB (QNAP, TrueNAS, UGREEN, Asustor). Enter the share address (for example smb://192.168.1.50/Multimedia) or use Bonjour auto-discovery to find it on the network. SMB is a standard protocol supported by every NAS, so the same workflow works across brands.

  • External SSD or USB-C drive. Plug a portable SSD into your iPad or iPhone (USB-C models) and point CullKit at the folder. This is the fastest setup and the most portable: carry the drive and cull wherever you are. Nothing is copied to the device; ratings are written directly to sidecars on the SSD.

  • Local folder on your Mac. Point CullKit at a working directory on your Mac, served over the local network. Useful if your workflow already involves copying cards to a day-rate folder on the Mac and you want to cull that folder from the sofa instead of at the desk.

How do my ratings get into Lightroom and Capture One?

This is the handoff that makes the whole workflow work. When you finish a culling session in CullKit, the app writes XMP sidecar files. An XMP sidecar is a small text file (usually a few kilobytes) that sits alongside your RAW file on disk. If your file is called IMG_4723.CR3, the sidecar is IMG_4723.CR3.xmp.

The sidecar contains your star rating, reject flag, colour label, and tags, all in a format that Lightroom, Capture One, and Darktable read natively. When you open your desktop editor and import the folder (or run “Read Metadata from Files” on an already-imported folder), those ratings appear automatically.

A few details that matter:

  • RAW+JPEG pairs. If you shoot both formats, CullKit reviews them as a single frame and writes one shared sidecar, following the Lightroom convention. No duplicate entries, no conflicting ratings.

  • Existing sidecars are preserved. If a frame already has a sidecar from another tool (common for files that have passed through Photo Mechanic or previous Lightroom sessions), CullKit downloads the existing sidecar, merges its new ratings in, and writes the merged file back. Nothing is overwritten.

  • XMP is your portability layer. Unlike a Lightroom catalogue, which cannot travel between different computers or tools, XMP sidecars are open, documented, and understood by every major photo editor. Your ratings remain accessible for as long as the sidecar file exists beside the RAW file.

Is this faster than culling in Lightroom?

In raw per-frame speed it is comparable: a swipe takes about as long as a keystroke, and both get you to two to three seconds per frame for a basic keep-or-reject decision. The speed-up comes from when and where you can do it.

A photographer shooting a Saturday wedding can copy the cards to the NAS before bed and cull all two thousand frames on their iPhone on Sunday morning, while having coffee. By the time they sit down at the computer, only the two hundred and fifty keeper frames remain for import. Those frames import faster because there are fewer of them, previews generate faster, and the editing session starts at the rating pass rather than at the first import dialogue. The hour of culling disappeared from the desk entirely.

For an event photographer with delivery targets, this is the difference between editing late on the shoot night and editing the next morning with all the discards already behind you. The time saved is not in the milliseconds per swipe; it is in moving the whole culling step out of the editing session.

Can I cull offline, without Wi-Fi or a network connection?

Yes, but the setup depends on where your photos live.

If you are culling from an external SSD or a local folder, you do not need a network connection at all. Plug the drive into your device and cull. This is the most reliable setup for travel, on-location days, and situations where you do not have reliable Wi-Fi.

If you are culling from a NAS, you need to be on the same local network as the NAS, or connected via VPN if you are remote. CullKit does not route NAS traffic through a cloud server; the connection is direct, local, and requires the device to reach the NAS on the network. This is by design: your photos are never relayed through a third party.

For photographers who travel with a portable NAS (a small two-bay device like a Synology DS223 or QNAP TS-233), connecting the iPad to the NAS’s own Wi-Fi hotspot or joining the same travel-router network gives you full culling access without internet.

Troubleshooting: why do not my ratings appear in Lightroom?

This has a few common causes with simple fixes:

  • Session not finished. CullKit writes sidecars when you complete the session. If you close the app mid-session without finishing, the ratings are saved internally but not yet written. Return to the session and complete it.

  • Lightroom has not read the sidecars. If the folder was already imported before you culled, Lightroom does not automatically pick up new sidecars. Select the folder in the Library module and run Metadata > Read Metadata from Files. This imports the XMP data into the catalogue.

  • Sidecar write is not enabled for this format. By default, CullKit writes sidecars for RAW and video files only. If you are working with JPEG or HEIC files and want sidecars, enable the broader XMP setting in CullKit’s preferences.

  • Permissions on the NAS. If CullKit can read the folder but not write to it, the sidecar creation will fail. Check that your NAS user account has read-write permissions on the photo share.

  • The sidecars are there but Lightroom ignores them. Lightroom Classic respects XMP sidecars by default. If yours are not being read, the catalogue preference “Automatically write changes into XMP” does not affect the read side; re-import the folder or run “Read Metadata from Files” as above.

What about culling video files and Live Photos?

CullKit handles video files (.mp4, .mov) and Apple Live Photos alongside stills in the same culling session. A video preview plays inline in the grid and in the full-screen viewer. You can rate and reject video frames the same way you rate stills, and those ratings are written to XMP sidecars.

Live Photos are treated as a single frame: the still key photo plus the short video clip play together in the viewer, and rating the frame rates the pair. This matters for wedding and event photographers who capture Live Photos alongside RAW and JPEG files during candid moments.

Try it: cull everywhere, import once

The first time you finish a shoot, copy the photos, and open CullKit on your phone instead of Lightroom on your laptop, the workflow change is immediate. You are not dreading the import. You are not staring at a library grid at your desk. You are on the sofa with your iPad, swiping through the best frame in a burst, and you realise the cull is already half done.

CullKit is available on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. The free tier lets you browse any connected library: Synology Photos, SMB NAS shares, external SSDs, and local folders. The Pro tier (7-day free trial, then monthly or yearly) unlocks the full culling workflow: star ratings, reject flags, colour labels, XMP sidecar writing, and folder organisation.

A built-in demo mode with seeded sample data lets you experience the full swipe-based culling flow before connecting your own library or committing to the trial.

Download CullKit on the App Store

CullKit is an independent product. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Synology Inc., QNAP Technologies, Inc., TrueNAS / iXsystems, UGREEN Group, Adobe (Lightroom), Capture One, or Darktable. Compatibility claims only. Trademarks belong to their respective owners.

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