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What Is Photo Culling? A Beginner's Guide to Faster Editing

By Ingo D · · Updated July 4, 2026

You come back from a shoot with 1,200 frames on your memory card. You know you only need a fraction of them. A wedding might produce 80 deliverable images. A portrait session might yield 30 keepers. The rest are duplicates, soft-focused frames, closed eyes, test shots, and compositions that did not land.

The process of turning that stack of raw captures into a shortlist of selects is called photo culling. If you are new to it, the good news is that culling is not complicated, and it is the single fastest way to speed up your entire post-shoot workflow. This guide covers what photo culling is, why it matters, and how to do it properly.

What is photo culling?

Photo culling is the first sorting pass over a group of images after a shoot. Its goal is simple: reduce a large set of frames to the ones worth editing and delivering, as quickly as possible, without getting distracted by exposure, colour, or composition tweaks. You are making yes-or-no decisions: keep or reject.

Culling is distinct from editing. Editing adjusts the look of a photo (exposure, contrast, colour grading). Culling decides which photos get edited at all. A professional photographer who shoots an eight-hour wedding might bring home 3,000 frames, cull to 400 keepers in a first pass, rate them by quality in a second pass, and finally edit the 80 best images for the client. Without a deliberate culling step, they would spend hours editing frames the client will never see.

Why can’t I just skip culling and edit everything?

You can, but it is the slowest possible approach. Reviewing and adjusting each frame one by one without first reducing the set means spending time on images you will discard anyway. For a travel photographer with 2,000 frames from a two-week trip, editing every single one would take days. Culling first means you invest your editing time only in the frames that have a future.

Culling is also mentally easier. The decision you make during culling is binary: keep or reject. That is much faster than deciding exactly how to edit a frame. When you separate the two tasks, you stay in a faster decision-making mode for the first pass, and you enter the slower, creative mode for editing only for the frames that passed the cull.

How do star ratings and flags work in photo culling?

The most common culling system is a combination of flags and star ratings. Flags are binary: you mark a frame as a pick (keep) or a reject (discard). Star ratings add more granularity by letting you rank survivors on a 1-to-5 scale. A typical workflow assigns 5 stars to the best frame of a sequence, 4 stars to strong alternatives, 3 stars to acceptable but not standout frames, and 1 or 2 stars to rejects. Colour labels, used in Lightroom and Capture One, add another dimension: red for urgent selects, yellow for second look, green for final selects, and so on.

These ratings serve a second purpose beyond the first pass. When you import photos into an editing tool, you can filter by rating. In Lightroom, for example, you can set the import filter to show only images rated 3 stars and above, so your catalogue never sees the rejected frames in the first place.

CullKit, a dedicated culling app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, supports this full rating system. It writes star ratings, flags, colour labels, and tags into standard XMP sidecar files that Lightroom, Capture One, and Darktable all read. You cull on the device in your hand, and your editor inherits the decisions automatically.

Can I cull photos directly on a NAS or external SSD?

Yes, and that is the key idea behind tools like CullKit. The traditional approach has been to copy your memory card to a laptop, import everything into Lightroom or Photo Mechanic, cull there, and then somehow push your selects back to your storage. That round-trip is slow, especially for photographers who store their libraries on a NAS.

CullKit reads photos directly from the storage where they live, using either the Synology Photos API or standard SMB for network shares (QNAP, TrueNAS, UGREEN, and any other SMB-compatible NAS). It also works with local folders and external SSDs connected to your Mac, iPad, or iPhone. The files are never copied or uploaded; CullKit browses and culls them in place. This means you can cull a shoot from a hotel room or on the train home, without ever opening your laptop, and your ratings are written back to the same folder alongside your RAW files.

CullKit is an independent product. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Synology Inc., QNAP Technologies, Inc., or any other storage vendor. Compatibility claims only.

How do my culling decisions get into Lightroom and Capture One?

Every rating, flag, and colour label you set in a culling app that writes metadata gets stored in an XMP sidecar file. XMP is an open standard maintained by Adobe. The sidecar is a small text file with the same filename as your RAW image plus a .xmp extension, stored in the same folder. When you open that folder in Lightroom (or synchronise an already-imported folder), Lightroom reads the sidecar and applies the ratings. Capture One reads the same sidecars. Darktable reads them too.

This is what makes the “cull before you edit” workflow possible. You never re-rate a photo after the first pass. The ratings travel from your culling tool to your editor automatically, through a file format that every major tool supports. CullKit writes these sidecars directly to your NAS, SSD, or folder, so the handoff is seamless. (More detail on the technical side in XMP Sidecar Workflow: From Cull to Lightroom in One Step.)

How do I start culling? A step-by-step workflow

If you are trying culling for the first time, here is a simple workflow to follow:

Step 1. Open your shoot folder in a culling tool. Point CullKit at your NAS share (smb://diskstation.local/photo/shoot-date for Synology, smb://192.168.1.50/photos/shoot-date for a typical QNAP) or at a local folder. Nothing is imported, just browsed.

Step 2. Do a fast first pass. Go through every frame in sequence. Reject the obvious discards: out of focus, closed eyes, test shots, duplicates. Speed matters here more than precision. Aim for about 2 seconds per frame. For a 1,000-frame shoot, that is about 33 minutes.

Step 3. Do a second pass on the survivors. Now look only at the frames you kept. Assign star ratings: 5 stars to the strongest few, 4 stars to alternates, 3 stars to acceptable extras. This is the pass that sets your editing priority.

Step 4. Open your editor. Import the folder into Lightroom, Capture One, or Darktable. Your star ratings, flags, and colour labels are already there. Filter by rating to see only the frames you want to edit.

Step 5. Edit your selects. Start with the 5-star frames, work through the 4-star alternates, and you are done. The rejected frames stay on your storage but never enter your editing session.

What is the difference between culling in Lightroom and culling in a dedicated app?

Lightroom has a Library module with pick and reject flags, and it supports star ratings. Many photographers do cull inside Lightroom. The difference is that Lightroom needs to import and build previews for every frame before you can start rating, and its interface is designed for catalogue management, not rapid triage. On folders with thousands of RAW files, the import step alone costs 10 to 20 minutes of wait time.

Dedicated culling tools skip the import step entirely. They read files directly from your storage and show them at full resolution without waiting for a catalogue import. CullKit runs on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, so you are not tied to a desk. You can cull a wedding on the train home, or a portrait session from a coffee shop, and have your selects waiting in Lightroom when you sit down at your desk.

Photo Mechanic is another dedicated culling tool, long used by working pros. It is fast and well established, but it runs only on desktop. CullKit is the first tool to bring the same speed and XMP metadata writing to mobile devices and direct NAS connections, giving you the flexibility to cull wherever you are.

Troubleshooting common culling mistakes

Culling too slowly. If you spend more than 5 seconds deciding on a single frame, you are overthinking it. Trust your instinct on the first pass. You can always adjust a rating in the second pass if you rejected something by mistake.

Not writing XMP sidecars. If your ratings do not appear in Lightroom, confirm your culling app is set to write XMP sidecars. In CullKit, XMP writing is enabled by default for Pro users, but check Settings if ratings seem to disappear. Also confirm the sidecar file actually appears next to your RAW files in the folder.

RAW and JPEG count as two frames. Many cameras shoot RAW+JPEG pairs. Without RAW+JPEG pairing, you end up rating the same image twice. CullKit groups pairs automatically and writes a single sidecar, following the Lightroom convention.

Importing before culling. This is the most common workflow mistake. Getting into the habit of culling before you open your editor saves the import-wait time on every single shoot you do from that point forward.

Why does culling before editing save you hours?

The time you spend culling is time you were going to spend anyway reviewing frames during editing. Culling does not add a step. It moves the reviewing step earlier in the workflow and makes it faster by keeping it separate from the slower decision-making of editing. For example, a portrait photographer with 600 frames can cull to 100 in 20 minutes, then edit the 100 in 2 hours. Without culling first, reviewing and editing all 600 frames in one session takes 3 to 4 hours because every image gets a full evaluation before the editing starts.

When you add NAS-based culling to this picture, the savings multiply. Instead of copying RAWs to a laptop, importing, culling, and exporting, you cull at the source and skip the copy step entirely. A wedding photographer who saves 90 minutes per shoot on the copy-import-cull round-trip has those minutes back for editing, client work, or rest. (More on that workflow in Skip the Laptop: Cull Before You Sit Down.)

When should I upgrade from free browsing to a Pro culling subscription?

The free tier of CullKit is designed for browsing: you can explore your NAS or local library, view images at full resolution, and familiarise yourself with the interface. Once you are ready to actually cull (assign star ratings, reject frames, write decisions to XMP), you need the Pro subscription. The Pro tier includes a 7-day free trial, so you can test the full culling workflow on a real shoot before committing. Many photographers find that the time saved on the first job alone justifies the subscription.

Try photo culling with CullKit

CullKit is built for exactly this workflow: open your folder, cull fast, write ratings to XMP sidecars, and hand off to Lightroom, Capture One, or Darktable. It runs on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, connects to any NAS over SMB or Synology Photos, and works with local folders and external SSDs. Nothing is uploaded. Your photos never leave your device.

Browse is free. Pro (7-day free trial, monthly or yearly) unlocks culling, star ratings, colour labels, tags, XMP writing, and folder organisation. A built-in demo mode lets you try the full culling workflow on sample data before you connect your actual library.

Download CullKit on the App Store

CullKit is an independent product. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Adobe (Lightroom), Capture One, or Darktable. Compatibility claims only.

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