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Niels Franke edited this page Jul 17, 2026 · 9 revisions

Cullimingo — user guide

Cullimingo is a fast, open-source, cross-platform photo-culling app for professional workflows. The job is simple and the whole app is built around doing it quickly: ingest → cull → filter → export → hand off.

A flamingo is nature's culler — a filter feeder that pumps in huge volumes, ejects the water and mud, and keeps only what's worth keeping. That's the job: get through thousands of frames and keep the keepers, fast.

Cullimingo is not a RAW developer, not a forever catalog, and there is no AI culling in v1.

The cull, step by step

  1. Open a folder of RAWs and/or JPEGs (⌘/Ctrl-O, or the Open folder button). Each folder opens as its own tab. Thumbnails decode in the background — the grid never blocks while it fills in.
  2. Rate, flag and colour with the keyboard as you arrow through the grid: 1–5 for stars, 0 to clear, P / X for pick / reject, 6–9 for colour labels. Marks persist instantly. See Keyboard for the full map.
  3. Look closer — Enter / F opens the full-screen loupe (zoom, pan, neighbour prefetch, plus histogram / clipping / focus-peaking overlays); C opens a compare view for 2-up / n-up decisions, and B compares the focused photo's whole group.
  4. Filter down — the quick-filter bar filters live by rating, flag, colour, keyworded or selected, each with a running count; a search box filters by filename as you type, and a RAW/JPEG type filter plus Stack brackets sit under its Metadata and Grouping menus. Collapse exposure brackets to one frame per stack to cut the grid down to the frames worth deciding on. Save named filter presets, or ⌘F to find by a pasted filename list (e.g. a Picdrop/CSV pick list).
  5. Export — a non-modal background export (resize / quality / sharpen / rename template / size cap), into one folder or beside each original, runs on an isolate pool so you can keep culling while it runs. RAW exports use the embedded preview.
  6. Hand off — drag the originals straight to Finder, or send to / pull client ratings back from a ContactSheet gallery.

What's in the box

  • Virtualized, dense dark grid with multi-select, batch marking, a right-click palette (rotate, rename, move/copy, delete to Trash, ContactSheet) and multi-folder tabs.
  • Full-screen loupe with analysis overlays (RGB histogram, highlight/shadow clipping, focus peaking), a filmstrip and Fit / 100% zoom, plus a 2-up / n-up compare view — all keyboard-cullable.
  • Exposure brackets auto-detected from EXIF: collapse a bracket to one grid cell (its reference frame, badged with the count), expand a selection to every ±EV sibling with G so client picks re-attach their brackets before export, and stack / unstack by hand — the decision round-trips via XMP.
  • Real filtering — live filename search, RAW/JPEG type filter, saved presets — plus find-by-filename.
  • Verified (SHA-256) card ingest with a token-based rename template, dual-destination, per-day date filtering, optional video copy and auto card-detect (inserting a card opens Import straight onto it).
  • XMP interop: rating + colour + keywords round-trip with Capture One and Lightroom; re-sync adopts external edits and flags conflicts. See RAW & interop.
  • Captioning for journalists: a full IPTC Core editor (single photo or batch), saved templates with named snapshots, =code= replacements and multi-field "hot codes", IPTC Subject Code / Media Topics, and offline GPS→city reverse geocoding. See Captioning & delivery.
  • Wire delivery: export straight to an FTP / FTPS / SFTP server, not just a local folder — saved servers, live connection test, retry-on-failure. See Captioning & delivery.
  • Metadata inspector, burst & duplicate grouping (perceptual-hash "find similar"), RAW+JPEG pairing, configurable shortcuts, performance presets, an in-app log viewer and reopen-last-folders.

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