AI photo culling · 100 % local · desktop app
You get back from a shoot with four thousand frames and an afternoon to sort them. shepherd goes through all of them and checks what you'd check first: focus, open eyes, the expression, the moment the movement peaks. It puts the frames that belong together in one group and its pick at the front of each. All of it happens on your own machine, so there's nothing to upload and nothing to wait for.
Why shepherd
Every pick is a suggestion, and you can see what it was based on: sharpness where it matters, whether the eyes are open, the expression, where the movement peaks. Disagree and one key fixes it. shepherd does the counting and the comparing. Which frame is actually good is still your call, and it never writes down a decision you haven't confirmed.
Everything runs on your computer. Your photos, their filenames and your folder structure stay there. No upload, no account. Weddings, nudes, hospital work, anything under an NDA: the files stay where you put them, and you can pull the network cable out and carry on culling. It's also why there's no waiting at the start. No upload bar to sit through.
One price, one payment. No monthly fee, no credits, no charge per image, nothing ticking away while you go back and forth between two frames for the third time. Two hundred photos or twenty thousand, it costs the same.
Same program either way. Start with the basics. Add the shooting statistics when you get curious about your own habits, and the local learning once culling has stopped being occasional and turned into a weekly job.
How it works
shepherd doesn't run off with your shoot. Every step is its own screen, you can go back and forth between them, and nothing gets written to disk until you say so.
01 · Analyze
Pick the folder you emptied the cards into. RAW, JPEG, or a RAW+JPEG pair that counts as one. shepherd reads the preview that's already sitting inside every RAW along with the shooting data, then looks at each frame: is it sharp where it needs to be, is it exposed, are the eyes open, is anyone smiling, where does the movement peak.
02 · Pick
Frames from the same moment sit together: the six-shot burst, the three near-identical portraits, the safety frame you always take. shepherd works out what kind of scene it's looking at, because a portrait shouldn't be judged like a landscape, and puts one keeper at the front of each group before you've looked at anything.
03 · Rate
Walk the groups from the keyboard: accept, promote another frame, throw out the whole burst, next. Your hand stays where it is. When two frames are genuinely close, put them next to each other with the zoom locked together and "which of these two" takes a second instead of a minute.
04 · Finish
Your decisions go into XMP sidecars next to the photos. That's what Lightroom, Capture One, Photo Mechanic, Bridge and FastRawViewer read anyway, so you open the folder in your editor and the selection is there. If you need the rating inside the file itself, shepherd can do that too, and it copies the untouched original aside before it does. Originals are never changed without a backup first. There's no setting to turn that off.
Shooting statistics · Flock and Range
Every frame remembers what the camera was set to. Read together, a shoot tells you things worth knowing: the focal length you never move off, the lens that stayed in the bag all day, the body that quietly did most of the work.
Focal length, shutter, ISO and aperture across the whole take, or narrowed down to one body or one lens.
Which camera and lens combinations did what share of the work, so a lopsided two-body day shows itself.
What was in your hand when, from the first frame to the last.
Product & packages
All three are the same program with the same analysis. Nothing is crippled, there's no watermark and no limit on photos. What differs is how much shepherd tells you about your own shooting, and whether it learns from your decisions. You pay once, in euro.
Basic
120 €
one payment · the whole job
Everything you need to take a shoot from folder to finished selection.
Most chosen
Pro
140 €
one payment · plus the numbers
Field, plus the numbers on how you actually shoot.
Expert
180 €
one payment · and it learns
Flock, plus a dog that remembers what you kept last time.
shepherd isn't on general sale yet. It's in late development, and I'd rather put it out when it's right than when it's due. The prices above are what I plan to charge. Write to me and I'll tell you the moment the first builds go out.
Contact
Questions about a package, an odd camera, a studio licence, or whether shepherd fits the way you work? Write to me. I read everything myself.
I answer in English and German, and I use your address to answer you. Not to put you on a list.
FAQ
No. Your photos, their filenames and your folder structure stay on your disk. shepherd analyses, scores and writes on the machine it's installed on, with no upload and no account, and it culls happily with the network switched off. The one thing that talks to my server is the licence: activating your key, and re-confirming it now and then, sends the key and an anonymous device fingerprint. Nothing about your pictures.
Not without a backup. By default your decisions go into XMP sidecars next to the photos and the originals stay untouched, byte for byte. If you ask shepherd to write the rating into the file itself, which some editors need because they ignore sidecars, it copies the untouched original into a backup folder first. You can put every one of them back.
Yes. Sidecars are how these programs already talk to each other: Lightroom, Capture One, Photo Mechanic, Bridge and FastRawViewer all read the stars and colour labels. shepherd sits before your editor and has no ambition to replace it.
The usual RAW formats from the usual manufacturers, plus JPEG. A RAW+JPEG pair of the same shot counts as one photo. If you shoot something unusual, send me the camera model and I'll tell you straight whether it works.
A normal current laptop or desktop. Everything runs on the CPU, so there's no graphics card to buy and nothing falls back to the cloud. More cores means the flock comes in faster. The heavier optional models are yours to switch on, not something you're stuck with.
Really. One payment for the package you pick. No monthly fee, no charge per image, no API credits. The analysis runs on hardware you already paid for, so there's nothing sensible for me to meter.
By email, as soon as the payment clears. It looks like
SHEPHERD-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX. Paste it into shepherd once, under
Activate. The licence doesn't expire and shepherd keeps culling
offline. It only needs to reach the licence server now and then to
re-confirm.
Two on one key. The idea is a desktop and a laptop. If you replace a machine, release its slot from inside the app and activate the new one.
Then you overrule them. That's one keystroke, and the shoot is yours again. shepherd never writes down a decision you didn't confirm. On Range those corrections are exactly what it trains on, on your machine, so it moves towards your eye rather than an average one.
Yes. They're the same program, so moving up means paying the difference and nothing else. Write to me and I'll sort it out.