For wildlife & nature photographers
10,000 burst frames. One keeper.
Birds in flight at 30fps. A leopard rolling out of cover. The peregrine's dive you waited four mornings to catch. The frame you actually want lives somewhere in a 400-image burst — and the rest of that burst is identical, except the wing is in slightly the wrong place. ShotSelect is built for finding that one frame fast, without uploading your hide-blind footage to a third-party cloud.
Download for macOS More on burst workflows →
v1.1.0 · 92 MB · Apple Silicon & Intel · macOS 12+
Burst grouping for 30fps sequences
A bird-in-flight burst from a Sony A1 or Nikon Z9 collapses to one viewer. Cycle through the sequence with Tab, pick the frame where the eye is sharp and the wings are at the right angle, reject the rest with one keystroke. Time-of-capture grouping respects natural gaps so unrelated subjects don't merge.
Peak-action keeper signals
On-device blur detection, eye-sharpness assist, and a compare mode (C) let you flip 2–4 candidate frames side-by-side at full pixel. Sync zoom on the eye. Pick the sharpest with ↑ on the winning panel. The model never sees your photos outside your Mac.
XMP for catalog handoff
Standard XMP sidecars hand off cleanly to Lightroom, Capture One, or Bridge for the edit pass. Star ratings, color labels, keywords, picks — all carried across. No "export to Lightroom" step. No proprietary database to migrate. The sidecar is the handoff.
Built for fieldwork pace
The cull pass after the hide.
You came home from the reserve with three SD cards full of 12,000 frames across four mornings. Nine in ten of those frames are duplicates of the same wingbeat. The frame you actually want is in there — somewhere — and Lightroom's library module starts to crawl past 2,000 images. ShotSelect's persistent photo_metadata cache stays responsive at 100,000+ images, and the keyboard-first cull means you're not moving the mouse to a "reject" button 10,000 times.
The workflow looks like this: open the folder, let burst grouping collapse the sequences, cycle through groups with Tab picking the one keeper per burst, star-rate the keepers 1–5 on a single pass, hit ⌘E to write XMP, open the same folder in Lightroom for the edit. A 12k-frame trip resolves in a focused working session.
On the free tier, your hide-blind footage stays on your Mac. The on-device CLIP model — used for natural-language search like "perched on branch" or "wide of the canopy" — runs on the Neural Engine. No upload, no account, no internet round-trip. Cull in airplane mode on the plane home.
Common questions from wildlife photographers
Does it handle 30fps Sony A1 / Nikon Z9 bursts?
Yes. Burst grouping is time-of-capture based and handles up to 30fps cleanly. Embedded JPEG previews render in 10–20 ms regardless of burst depth, so cycling through a 200-frame sequence with Tab feels instant.
Will it stay responsive at 100,000 images?
Yes. The persistent photo_metadata cache is built for this load. Grid views, search, and filtering stay snappy at six-figure folders. The cache is local to your Mac.
Does it read EXIF tags like focal length and shutter speed for filtering?
Yes. EXIF is parsed from RAW headers on import. Filter by focal length, shutter speed, ISO, lens, or camera body — useful when you want to compare the 600mm sequences against the 200–600 zoom shots.
Can I cull on a laptop in a remote location with no signal?
Yes. ShotSelect runs 100% offline. The AI model is bundled with the app. No license check, no cloud telemetry, no internet required.
Does the AI search understand wildlife subjects?
The bundled CLIP model handles generic visual concepts ("bird in flight", "perched", "wide landscape", "tight portrait", "wings spread"). It's a search and surfacing tool, not an auto-culler — you still pick the keeper.
Try it on your next trip.
Free. macOS. Open the folder, find the one keeper.
Built for your shoot