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Cull photos
in your browser

Culling is going through a shoot and keeping the few frames you will use. Abney does it in the browser, free, in Chrome or Edge on a Mac or Windows computer. Nothing to install. Nothing uploads until you share, and then only previews, never your originals. Your photos lie on a desk, like prints on a table. Rate them with the 1 to 5 keys, there or in the lightbox, then sort the shoot by rating. Three thousand frames to thirty keepers.

Get startedTry it with sample photos

Candidates out on the desk, the rest in the tray1 to 5 from the keyboard

Create a project and import

Projects Make a new project here, or open one you already have. Open Projects
  1. 01 Make the project Open abney.cc/projects and press New project. The first time, Abney asks for your name and email and sends you a code. The account is free. Then type a name for the project and pick where on your computer it lives. Abney makes a folder with that name there. To try the keys before you make a project, open abney.cc/desk and press Try the sample desk. Nothing you do there is saved.
  2. 02 Import the whole shoot Press Import photos and bring in everything from every device that shot that day, the camera’s cards and the phone included. Importing copies each file into the project’s folder. Nothing is moved. Your camera’s raw files open too, from the JPEG the camera saved inside each one. Some cameras save a small one, and the import report says how many will look soft on the desk. For a DNG with no JPEG inside, like an iPhone’s ProRAW, Abney develops from the raw data instead. A phone’s HEIC opens.
  3. 03 Find it in the tray The photos land in the tray, the strip of thumbnails along the bottom of the screen, stacked by the day they were shot. Press T if the tray is closed.

Rate the shoot

The desk The shoot laid out, ready to rate. Open the desk
  1. 01 Move a day onto the desk Drag a day’s worth of thumbnails from the tray onto the desk, as many as you can see at once. Anything you might keep goes out here, and you decide that by looking rather than by rating yet. The tray still lists the whole shoot, desk photographs included, which is how the picks come back to you in the next chapter.
  2. 02 Open the lightbox Select a photograph and press Space. The lightbox opens full screen, and the left and right arrow keys move to another photograph on the desk, but not in the order you laid them out. Or select a thumbnail in the tray and press Space. The lightbox then walks the tray in the order it is showing, which is how you get through three thousand without laying them all out. The arrow keys only move between photographs inside the lightbox. On the desk they nudge the selected photograph instead.
  3. 03 Rate from the keyboard Press 1 to 5 to rate, in the lightbox or straight on a selection at the desk. 0 clears a rating anywhere, and in the lightbox the same number again clears it too. With the tray open, every rated photograph on the desk wears its stars above its top left corner. In the tray, a rated thumbnail carries its stars in the bottom corner. There is no AI culling in Abney. Every rating is yours.
  4. 04 Send the misses back Press H on anything you are not keeping and it goes back to the tray. Nothing is deleted, and the ones you are still comparing stay on the desk.
A woman in tortoiseshell glasses looks straight into the camera against a plain grey wall
One frame full screen, rated five1 to 5 rate, 0 clears

Pick the keepers

Rating three thousand frames leaves a few hundred. Picking the keepers takes them down to thirty.

To pick on paper instead, lay the shoot out with the free contact sheet maker and circle the keepers before you print.

  1. 01 Sort the tray by rating Switch the tray’s sort from Date to Rating. The five star band leads and unrated photographs sort last.
  2. 02 Filter to the picks Set the tray’s filter to ★★★★ and up. Everything below the line disappears, so only the picks are left to compare.
  3. 03 Compare and re-rate Go through the band in the lightbox once more, comparing the picks against each other, and change the number where the comparison changed your mind, up or down. The ratings live in the project, and Abney writes no sidecar file, so a star here is not a star in Lightroom. To take the keepers to another program, right-click the selection and choose Export, which writes a JPG or PNG of each at full size into a folder you pick.
The tray on Rating, ★★★★ and upFive stars lead

Rate it,
then keep it.

You now have a project, the shoot imported, the keepers rated on the desk, and everything else in the tray, sorted by rating.

Get startedNext, edit your photos and find a look