Your First Cull

After Your First Import, this tour goes from a full library to the photos worth keeping. Every step works with the keyboard (Keyboard Shortcuts).

1. Look through the timeline

The Library tab shows every photo, newest day first. Scroll, or move with the arrow keys; Enter opens a photo full screen in the loupe, where Z zooms to 100% to check focus (Library).

Photos taken in a burst are framed together as a series; the green border and ★ mark the best photo of each series (Series). Stack series shows only the best of each, to see the shoot at a glance.

2. Let the AI help (optional)

Under Settings → AI models, download the CLIP image encoder and the face models. Picturesque then scores every photo in the background: how good it looks, whether eyes are closed, whether faces are sharp (Local AI). Series pick their best photo with these signals, and Best quality first sorts the whole library by score.

3. Pick and reject

  • P picks, X rejects, U unflags; 1 to 5 give stars.

  • In the loupe, the keys apply to the photo shown; in the timeline, to every selected photo (select with Shift+click, Ctrl+click or Shift+arrows).

  • Ctrl+Z undoes.

Decisions are saved right away, and written to XMP sidecars so Lightroom, darktable and digiKam see them.

4. Compare close calls

Select a photo of a series and press C: the series opens side by side, best-ranked first (Compare). Z zooms every photo to the same spot, Shift+arrows pan them together; pick the keeper with P, reject the rest with X, or press B to make another photo the series’ best.

5. Narrow down

The Filters panel narrows the timeline: only unflagged photos, three stars or more, a date, a place, a camera, sharp photos only, no closed eyes. The search box finds photos by description (kids on the beach) once the text model is downloaded (Text search).

6. Deliver and tidy up

  • Export… copies the picks to a folder, as originals or resized JPEGs, every file verified (Exporting).

  • Move rejects… moves the rejected photos into _Rejected inside the library, out of the way and still undoable (Moving Rejects).