Cullimingo

A fast, open-source, cross-platform photo-culling app for professional workflows.
Ingest → cull → filter → export → hand off. Speed is the product. 🦩

User guide · Keyboard · Screenshots · Architecture · Build plan · License

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.

_{Rating, flagging and colouring a shoot in the grid · more screenshots → · placeholder photos via Lorem Picsum (Unsplash; see credits)}

About

Photography software keeps drifting behind subscriptions and the cloud, while the open-source side stays thin — capable, but rarely polished for a real culling session. I wanted a fast, keyboard-first culling app I owned outright, so I built one for my own photo workflow and shared it. Bug reports and feedback are very welcome — see Bug reports & feedback.

Download

Grab the latest build from the Releases page.

• Linux — download the .AppImage, make it executable, and run it:

  chmod +x Cullimingo-x86_64.AppImage
  ./Cullimingo-x86_64.AppImage

• Linux (Flatpak) — install from Cullimingo's own Flatpak repository (x86_64 and ARM); it updates through flatpak update or your software centre:

  flatpak install --user https://nielsfranke.github.io/Cullimingo/io.github.nielsfranke.Cullimingo.flatpakref

• macOS — download Cullimingo-arm64.dmg for Apple Silicon (M1 and later) or Cullimingo-x86_64.dmg for Intel Macs (macOS 12 or later). Open it and drag Cullimingo to Applications. The app is signed and notarized by Apple.

Both builds are self-contained — no Homebrew or apt libraries needed. See DISTRIBUTION.md for the details.

What it does

• Cull at speed — open a folder of RAWs, JPEGs or HEIC/HIF → virtualized, dense dark grid → keyboard rate / flag / colour that persists instantly. Turn on auto-advance (Settings → General) to jump to the next photo after each mark. Multi-select + batch marking, right-click palette (incl. Delete… to the Trash, sidecars and all), tabs for multiple folders.
• Loupe & compare — full-screen loupe (zoom/pan, neighbour prefetch) and a 2-up / n-up compare view, both keyboard-cullable.
• Exposure brackets — auto-detected from EXIF and collapsed to one cell per bracket in the grid (the reference frame badged with its count). Expand a selection to every ±EV sibling with G — so client picks re-attach their brackets before export — plus optional mark-the-whole-bracket, and manual stack / unstack that round-trips via XMP.
• Real filtering & selections — quick-filter bar (rating / flag / colour / keyworded / selected, live counts), live filename search, a RAW / JPEG file-type filter, saved named selections, and ⌘F find by a pasted filename list. Import a Picdrop/CSV list to select the matching RAWs.
• Ingest — verified (SHA-256) card import with a token-based rename template, dual-destination (the backup is always read back), throughput readout, and auto card-detect that opens Import on insert. Pick which shooting days to bring in, with or without the JPEGs. Copies land under a hidden part name and are published only once verified, never replacing an existing file; a full disk or an unplugged destination is caught before anything is copied, and a partly unreadable card is reported instead of passing as imported.
• Metadata & interop — XMP sidecars round-trip rating + colour + keywords with Capture One and Lightroom (read embedded XMP too); pick/reject lives in a private cullimingo: namespace. Re-sync adopts external edits, flags conflicts.
• Captioning for journalists — a full IPTC Core editor (single photo or batch), saved metadata templates with named snapshots and apply-on-ingest, =code= replacements and multi-field "hot codes", IPTC Subject Code / Media Topics, and offline GPS→city reverse geocoding. Exports embed IPTC as both XMP and legacy IIM.
• Export — non-modal background export (bounded-concurrency isolate pool): resize / quality / sharpen / rename template / size cap, into one folder or beside each original — keep culling while it runs. RAW exports use the embedded preview.
• Hand-off — drag originals straight to Finder, verified copy / move the selection (with XMP sidecars) to any folder, send it to your own editors (Capture One / Lightroom / Photoshop / GIMP / …) via the right-click menu or ⌘E, wire it straight to an agency over FTP / FTPS / SFTP, or send to / pull client ratings back from a ContactSheet gallery.
• Polish — metadata inspector, burst & duplicate grouping (+ perceptual-hash "find similar"), RAW+JPEG pairing, configurable shortcuts, performance presets, in-app log viewer, reopen-last-folders.

RAW preview extraction is C/C++ FFI via LibRaw (no Rust); thumbnails decode and resize off the UI isolate through libvips. The UI isolate never blocks.

Cullimingo is not a RAW developer, not a forever catalog, and no AI culling in v1 — see BUILD_PLAN.md for the non-goals. Video is culled by its poster frame; playback hands off to your system player (no in-app playback).

Keyboard

Keys	Action
arrows	navigate the grid
1–5	rate · 0 / Delete clears
P / X	pick / reject
6 7 8 9	colour: red / yellow / green / blue · Backspace purple
Space	select · ⌘/Ctrl-click toggle · Shift-click range
G	expand the selection to its exposure bracket
Enter / F	loupe · C compare · B burst
I	metadata inspector · K keywords
⌘/Ctrl O T W A F S E R	open · new tab · close tab · select all · find · export · send to primary editor · refresh
?	shortcuts cheat sheet (rebindable in Settings)

Instantly familiar — the defaults follow the de-facto culling keys (1–5 rate, 0 clears, P/X pick/reject, 6–9 colours). No new muscle memory to learn, and every key is rebindable in Settings. For a pick/reject-through-the-shoot pass, enable Auto-advance to the next photo after rating or flagging in Settings → General.

Full list: Keyboard on the wiki.

Documentation

📖 User guide	What Cullimingo does and how to cull with it
⌨️ Keyboard	The full keyboard map
🖼️ Screenshots	Grid, loupe, compare and the inspector
🛠️ Development	Set up, run and build from source
🎞️ RAW & interop	LibRaw, libvips, XMP round-trip with C1 / Lightroom
✍️ Captioning & delivery	IPTC templates, hot codes, reverse geocoding, FTP/FTPS/SFTP wire transmission
🏗️ Architecture	Layers, isolates, cache — the technical map
🗺️ Build plan	Phased plan, locked stack and rationale

Develop

flutter pub get
dart run build_runner watch --delete-conflicting-outputs   # keep running
flutter run -d macos      # or: flutter run -d linux

macOS needs Xcode + CocoaPods; both platforms need LibRaw and libvips for RAW/thumbnail decode (brew install libraw vips, or the distro -dev packages). Full setup and the pre-commit checks are in Development.

Bug reports & feedback

Please open a GitHub issue for bugs, questions and feature ideas — rather than email. Issues keep the details, screenshots and follow-ups in one place, other users with the same problem can find them, and you get notified when a fix ships. A useful bug report says which Cullimingo version you run (Settings → About), your OS and Mac model or Linux distro, and — for files that don't display — the camera model and file type (e.g. Sony .ARW).

Support

Cullimingo is free, open-source, and built in my spare time. If it saves you time on a shoot and you'd like to help keep it going, you can buy me a coffee — every bit is appreciated. ☕

License

GNU AGPL-3.0-or-later. Cullimingo is free software — use, modify, and self-host it freely. If you distribute a modified version, you must release your changes under the same license and make the corresponding source available.

Contributions are welcome under a simple Contributor License Agreement.

Reverse geocoding uses place data from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0), bundled as assets/geo/cities.tsv.gz (regenerate with tool/build_gazetteer.sh).

The Media-Topics autocomplete uses the IPTC Media Topics NewsCodes (CC BY 4.0, © IPTC), bundled as assets/iptc/mediatopics.tsv.gz (regenerate with tool/build_media_topics.sh).