About
Built by a photographer, for the cull pass.
ShotSelect started in a hotel room after a wedding, with three SD cards on the desk and a deadline the next morning. The cull stack — Photo Mechanic, Lightroom's library module, Aftershoot's cloud queue — felt fragmented, slow, and oddly expensive for software meant to help you decide which frames to keep.
Who builds it
ShotSelect is built by a working photographer who shoots weddings and events, and who got tired of the post-shoot stack. There's no marketing team. There's no investor pressure to add cloud anything. The person who decides what ships is the same person who has to use it next weekend on real client work.
Why it exists
The cull pass — the hour or three after a shoot where you decide which frames are keepers, which are rejects, and which need a second look — sits in a weird spot in the post-production stack. Lightroom is built for the edit, not the cull, and its library module slows down past a few thousand frames. Photo Mechanic is fast but costs $150/yr and hasn't fundamentally changed in a decade. Aftershoot and Narrative Select are powerful but they want your client's wedding uploaded to a third-party cloud and they cost $240–720/yr.
What was missing: a free, on-device, keyboard-first app that does one thing — the cull pass — really well, and hands off cleanly to whatever you edit in. So that got built.
Design philosophy
Keyboard-first, mouse-optional. Every action has a single keystroke. The mouse is a fallback, not the primary interface. If your fingers know Photo Mechanic's defaults — P pick, X reject, 1–5 stars, 6–9 colors — they already know ShotSelect's.
On-device by default. On the free tier, photos stay on your Mac. The AI model — used for natural-language search across a folder — is bundled with the app and runs on the Neural Engine. There's no upload step, no account, no cloud round-trip. The app works fully offline because that's what culling on a press-row laptop or a remote location actually demands.
Lightroom-compatible, not Lightroom-lock-in. ShotSelect writes standard XMP sidecars. Lightroom reads them. Capture One reads them. Bridge reads them. If a better cull app shows up next year, your ratings come with you — that's the whole point of XMP. We're committed to not being the lock-in.
Honest pricing. The core cull workflow is free for personal and commercial use. We may charge for advanced workflow features later (client review links, team sync, studio multi-seat) once they graduate from beta. What's free today stays free.
What's next
Mac today. Windows soon — same workflow, same shortcuts, same XMP. After that: a Share-link beta for mobile-friendly client review, opt-in and clearly scoped. Then a studio multi-seat tier for teams. The core cull pass stays free through all of it.
Get in touch
Email [email protected] for anything — feature requests, bug reports, the kind of email that starts with "would you ever consider…". Support questions go to [email protected]. Responses come from a person who knows the product end to end.
The fine print
Try it on your next shoot.
Free. macOS. Open the folder and start culling.