For wedding photographers
Wedding cullers don't have six hours.
ShotSelect takes a 3,000-frame Saturday wedding to a 387-photo client gallery in 90 minutes flat. Keyboard-first cull, tag-as-you-go, XMP straight to Lightroom — no cloud upload, no subscription, no waiting on an AI to score your couple's first kiss.
Download for macOS Read the 90-minute wedding workflow →
v1.1.0 · 92 MB · Apple Silicon & Intel · macOS 12+
Tag-as-you-cull
Stars, color labels, and keyword tags happen during the cull pass. Press T to tag, 1–5 for stars (0 clears), 6–9 for colors. No mode switches. No second pass to organise.
Burst groups, auto-collapsed
10-frame ceremony bursts collapse into one viewer. Cycle through with Tab. Pick the best, reject the rest in one keystroke. Compare mode opens any 2–4 frames side by side at full pixel.
Lightroom-ready XMP
Star ratings, picks, colors, and keywords all write to standard XMP sidecars. Open the folder in Lightroom Classic — every rating is already there. No catalog import. No Smart Previews. No conversion step.
A wedding cull, end to end
The 90-minute Saturday-night workflow.
Real shoot: 3,247 Canon CR3s from a 12-hour wedding. Imported, culled, tagged, and XMP-exported in 1 hour 30 minutes on an M2 Pro.
Drop the SD card
Drag the folder onto ShotSelect. 3,247 thumbnails ready in 1.4s. The session is auto-saved — close the laptop, reopen tomorrow, pick up exactly where you left off.
Round 1: keep / reject pass
↑ keep, ↓ reject. ~35 minutes for a 3k shoot at 1.5 sec per frame. Burst groups auto-collapse to one frame so you don't waste keystrokes on duplicates.
Round 2: stars on the highlights
Filter to "kept" only. Walk the timeline once more, pressing 5 on portfolio frames and 3 on hero deliverables. ~12 minutes on the ~1,400 keeps.
Round 3: colors by edit difficulty
Color-code edit complexity (red = heavy, yellow = medium, green = quick) so you can plan your Sunday edit session. 6–0 map to the 5 colors.
Export XMP
⌘ E writes XMP sidecars next to every RAW. 2 seconds. Open the folder in Lightroom Classic — every star, color, and pick is already there.
Done.
3,247 → 387 selects, sorted by deliverable type, edit-difficulty color-coded, ratings in Lightroom. Coffee still warm.
Read the round-by-round playbook →
Your couple's wedding stays on your Mac.
Wedding photography is a trust contract. The couple gives you their day; you give them the gallery. Nobody in that contract said anything about their first kiss being processed on a third-party GPU.
On the free tier, ShotSelect runs 100% on-device. The CLIP model that powers natural-language search lives on your Mac's Neural Engine. There is no upload step. No cloud account. No telemetry on photo content. The app works offline — useful when you're culling on a venue's wifi-free shooting bay.
That's the difference between ShotSelect and AI cloud cullers like Aftershoot or Narrative Select — same speed, no upload. See the comparison →
Common questions from wedding photographers
Will my Lightroom catalogue see the ratings?
Yes. ShotSelect writes star ratings, picks, color labels, and keywords to standard XMP sidecars. Open the folder in Lightroom Classic; right-click → Metadata → Read Metadata from File if you've already imported. Capture One reads the same files. XMP sidecars explained →
Does it handle CR3, ARW, NEF?
Yes — 40+ RAW formats including all the wedding-camera workhorses: Canon CR3/CR2 (R5/R6/1DX), Sony ARW (A1/A7/A9), Nikon NEF (Z9/Z8), Fuji RAF (GFX series), Panasonic RW2, Apple ProRAW. ShotSelect uses the embedded JPEG preview for fast culling, then writes XMP sidecars next to the RAW.
How does it deal with double-shooter shoots?
Drop both photographers' folders into the session. ShotSelect treats them as one timeline; you can filter by source folder if you need to credit images separately. Burst groups respect time-of-capture so cross-photog ceremony bursts cluster correctly.
What about my second-shooter's deliverables?
Color labels work well for this — assign one color per shooter, filter by color at export time. The label travels through XMP into Lightroom, so the structure persists into your edit workflow.
Can I send picks to my couple to choose favourites?
The client-review-link feature is in active beta — mobile-friendly review URL that your couple opens on their phone, picks favourites, then those picks sync back to your gallery. Beta is free; see the changelog for current status.
Does it sync between my desktop and laptop?
Cross-device session sync is in beta (off by default). Sessions auto-save to a local SQLite database; if you opt in to sync, it syncs encrypted session metadata only — never the photos themselves.
Try it on Sunday's wedding.
Free. macOS. Open the folder, start culling.
Built for your shoot