OpenCull 0.3.0

What's new

• Crop and straighten. Press R, or use the new toolbar button, to crop a photo. Drag a handle to resize, drag inside to slide the photo, drag outside to turn it. Hold the crop to a shape (Original, 1×1, 4×5, 5×7, 2×3, 4×3, 16×9 or your own), straighten with the slider or by drawing a line along something that should be level, and step through composition guides with O. Enter keeps the crop, Esc leaves the photo as it was, and the arrow keys keep it and carry on at the next photo.
• Rotate and flip. ⌘[ and ⌘] (Ctrl+[ and Ctrl+]) turn a photo a quarter turn, and the right-click menu has Flip Horizontal and Flip Vertical. They work on a selection too.
• Saved for your editor, never into the photo. A crop is saved beside the photo the same way Lightroom and Camera Raw save theirs, so they open it already cropped and you can still change it there. Your originals are not touched.
• Photos you cropped in Lightroom show cropped here. Crops, straightening and rotation made in Lightroom or Camera Raw are now shown in the big view, the filmstrip, the grid and the face panel, with a small mark on cropped thumbnails.
• Undo works at both levels. Inside crop mode, undo and redo step through what you have done to the crop. Outside it, one undo takes the whole crop back.
• Skip This Version. The window that offers an update now lets you pass over a version; you will be offered the next one.

Worth knowing:

• If you are on 0.2.5, OpenCull should offer you this version itself the next time it opens. This is the first release to arrive that way. If it does not, or the install fails, please download it below and tell us.
• Cropping is new. If a crop looks different in Lightroom from how it looked here, please open an issue with what you saw.
• Colour and exposure edits from an editing program are not shown; OpenCull shows the picture as the camera made it, with the crop applied.
• Some photos cannot be cropped here and say so: ones shot with the camera set to a different shape from its sensor (16:9 or square with a RAW beside it), and ones whose sidecar file cannot be read with certainty. They are left exactly as they are.
• Lightroom only reads a JPEG's crop from inside the JPEG. To have it see crops on JPEG-only photos, turn on Write ratings and crops into JPEGs in Settings. A rotation or flip on a JPEG stays in OpenCull either way.
• A crop on a DNG shows in OpenCull but not in Lightroom, which keeps a DNG's settings inside the file.

Download

System	File
macOS, Apple silicon (M1 and later)	OpenCull_0.3.0_aarch64.dmg
Windows 10 and 11	OpenCull_0.3.0_x64-setup.exe (or the .msi)
Linux (Ubuntu 24.04, Fedora 40, Debian 13 or newer)	.AppImage, .deb or .rpm

The other files on this page (latest.json, and those ending in .sig or .app.tar.gz) are what the app uses to update itself. You do not need them.

The installers are not signed with a paid developer certificate, so each system asks before running them the first time:

• macOS — open the .dmg and drag OpenCull to Applications. The first time you open it macOS will refuse. Go to System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down, and choose Open Anyway.
• Windows — SmartScreen shows "Windows protected your PC". Choose More info, then Run anyway.
• Linux — for the AppImage, make it executable (chmod +x) and run it.

Please know

This is an early release. It is used daily on a Mac, and has been tested and confirmed working on Windows and Linux. If something goes wrong on your system, please open an issue and say what happened.

Not here yet: an Intel Mac build, HEIC files, and RAW rendering for cameras that embed only a small preview.