One line
25 wordsCullibrate is a fast, local-first photo-culling workspace for Mac and Windows — grouping, four review modes, face-aware checks, and Lightroom handoff — built solo and priced at $29/year.
01 / Press
Press kit.
Take what you need.
Everything required to write about Cullibrate accurately: boilerplate you can paste, facts you can check, and a plain list of the things we will not claim.
Contactcontact@cullibrate.com
FoundedNew Zealand
LaunchedJuly 2026
Review accessOn request
02 / Boilerplate
Written to be pasted.
Three lengths, all accurate as written. Please use them as they are rather than paraphrasing the product claims.
Standard
100 wordsCullibrate is a desktop culling workspace for photographers who review thousands of frames per shoot. Culling runs entirely on-device — original files never upload — with grouping of similar frames, four review modes including face-level checks, ratings, flags, filters, and XMP handoff to Lightroom. It was built by Daniel Robinson, a New Zealand software engineer and lifelong photographer who spent two years at Narrative working on culling software, and whose first project as a developer was a culling prototype. Built solo with AI-agent tooling, Cullibrate is priced accordingly: a $29/year founding plan, with a 7-day trial that needs no credit card.
Technical
For engineering coverageCullibrate is a desktop photo-culling application built on Tauri 2 with a Rust image pipeline. RAW decode, thumbnail generation, similarity grouping, and face detection all run on-device; original files never leave the machine. The optional Gallery service uploads only the finished JPEGs a photographer deliberately chooses to publish. It ships for macOS on Apple Silicon and Windows on x64, and is developed by a single engineer working with AI-agent tooling.
03 / Facts
Checkable in a minute.
- Product
- Cullibrate — desktop photo-culling workspace
- Platforms
- macOS on Apple Silicon · Windows on x64
- Price
- $29 / year founding plan, renewing at $29 while the subscription stays active
- Future price
- $120 / year is the expected price for new customers later
- Trial
- 7 days of full access, no credit card
- Architecture
- Tauri 2 with a Rust image pipeline; culling runs on-device
- File handling
- Originals stay local; only deliberately published Gallery JPEGs upload
- Company
- One founder working with AI-agent tooling, New Zealand
- Launched
- July 2026
04 / Story
Three honest angles.
Not a pitch list — these are the parts of the story that hold up to questions, with the founder writing that stands behind each one.
The price is an argument, not a discount
The category settled around $150–250 a year. Cullibrate is $29. That is not a promotional rate hiding a jump: it follows from one engineer plus AI tooling being able to build and support what used to need a team, and the founder published the uncomfortable reasoning rather than leaving it to speculation — including the part he does not yet know.
Pricing, wide openTwenty years from a market stall to a culling desk
A Sony Cyber-shot in 2002, greeting cards sold at a market to fund the next camera, and a first-ever software project a decade later that was — without the author noticing the pattern — a photo-culling prototype. Two years at Narrative working on culling software sat in the middle. Cullibrate is that first idea, finished.
A founding storyJudgment-first, against the auto-cull wave
Most of the category is racing to have AI pick the photographs. Cullibrate makes a deliberately different bet: the machine handles grouping, faces, and search, while the photographer keeps the selection. It is a position about what the photographer is for, and it is arguable — which is what makes it worth writing about.
Culling isn’t editing05 / Limits
What we will not claim.
Published so nobody has to guess where the marketing stops. If you see any of these attributed to Cullibrate, it did not come from us — and we would like to know.
- A finished automatic selection. The AI assists; it does not deliver a final cull.
- A photo editor, a retouching tool, or a Lightroom replacement.
- A publishing suite. Gallery delivers finished JPEGs; it is not a portfolio platform.
- Quantified time savings. Culling speed depends on the shoot, so we publish no multiplier.
- That AI tooling made building this easy. It changed the economics, not the difficulty.
06 / Contact
Ask anything.
Interviews, screenshots at print resolution, or a question you would rather check before publishing — write directly and a person answers.
contact@cullibrate.comReview licences
Reviewing Cullibrate? Ask and we will set up a founding licence, no strings and no conditions on what you write. We would rather have an honest review than a kind one.
Founder bio
Daniel Robinson is a software engineer and lifelong photographer building the culling workspace he first prototyped a decade ago. He spent two years at Narrative working on culling software used by photographers worldwide, and now builds Cullibrate solo from New Zealand.