OpenCull 0.4.0

What's new

• Advanced AI, for anyone who wants to try it. A new switch in Settings, under AI, turns on a newer way of judging faces. It is still being worked on, so it is off until you turn it on, and with it off OpenCull judges your photos exactly as 0.3.0 did. With it on:
  • Every face is given a state. The face panel says what each face is doing in a photographer's words: Eyes Fully Open, Smiling, Laughing, Looking Down, Facing Away, Eyes Closed, Mid-Blink and more, coloured by how much there is to worry about.
  • A blink is told apart from eyes that are meant to be that way. Someone looking down, laughing with their eyes narrowed, or closing their eyes in a hug no longer marks a photo down the way a blink does. A blink at the camera still does, and is what turns a thumbnail's strip red.
  • Looking away counts only where it matters. Where nobody in the photo is looking at the camera, such as a couple looking at each other, it costs the photo nothing. Where everyone else is looking, it costs a little.
  • Looking away is judged from the eyes. OpenCull now takes a closer look at the eyes themselves rather than going mostly by the turn of the head, so it catches more people who are looking away and wrongly flags fewer who are looking at you.
  • People in the background are picked out better, by weighing each face against the rest of the photo rather than by size alone.
  • Switching analyses the open folder again. Each way remembers its own results, so switching back is instant.
• Copy and paste a crop. ⌘C and ⌘V (Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V), or the right-click menu, copy one photo's crop onto the photos you have selected. It lands on the same part of each photo, tilt included, and one undo takes it back.
• Safer copying from a memory card. Cameras reuse file names. Skip Existing and Overwrite now go by the photo itself and not by its name, so a different photo that happens to share a name is copied alongside rather than skipped or written over.
• A rating that could not be saved now says so, and a sidecar file that cannot be read is left alone rather than replaced.
• Colour labels stay in sight on a selected photo.

Worth knowing:

• Advanced AI is unfinished. If it gets a photo wrong, please tell us what it said and what you saw. Turning the switch off puts everything back as it was.
• With Advanced AI on, a blink on a face turned away from the camera can be let off lightly. There it cannot yet tell a blink from eyes closed on purpose, so it treats both as worth a look rather than a fault.
• If you are on 0.3.0, OpenCull should offer you this version itself the next time it opens.

Download

System	File
macOS, Apple silicon (M1 and later)	OpenCull_0.4.0_aarch64.dmg
Windows 10 and 11	OpenCull_0.4.0_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.