Cullibrate is live. I haven't made much noise about it yet, which makes this a quiet launch — the software equivalent of a restaurant's soft opening. The menu is real, the kitchen works, and if you come in now, there's a decent chance the chef appears at your table asking how the meal was.
What Cullibrate is today
A fast, keyboard-driven culling workspace for Mac and Windows. Point it at a shoot and it's ready before you've settled into your chair. From there, the review works the way working photographers actually cull:
- Filmstrip for the classic one-at-a-time pass, Grid for the shape of the whole shoot, Survey for putting near-identicals side by side, and Face survey for checking every face in the frame — eyes, expressions — without hunting through zoom levels.
- Stacks. Related frames group together, so you are judging the moment rather than wading through the burst.
- Face detection and grouping are already in, working away behind those surfaces.
- The verdicts you already speak: stars, colour labels, pick and reject — all on the keyboard, all remappable.
- The practical bits: crop and level, renaming, capture-time repair. Your picks and ratings hand off cleanly to Lightroom, Photoshop, or Capture One.
- Everything runs locally on your machine, offline included, and your original files are never touched.
What's next
The intelligence layer gets deeper from here — noticeably better focus detection and image assessment are what I'm building right now, along with Apple Photos library support. Cullibrate already fully supports Windows. That's the shape of 1.0, and it's weeks away, not months.
The founding offer
The founding plan is $29/year. Everything included, with a free trial first and a 14-day refund window behind that. Claim it while it's available and it renews at $29/year while your paid subscription stays active. The thinking behind the price has its own post.
Why quiet?
Because I'd rather earn the first hundred photographers one conversation at a time than launch loudly at ten thousand strangers. The support widget in the corner of this site reaches me, not a team pretending to be bigger than it is. If you try Cullibrate on a real shoot and something bothers you, tell me. There's a fair chance it's fixed before the loud launch.
And if you're the sort who reads release notes, stick around — this blog is where the work gets documented.