AI culling

AI culling is the part of Reveal that tries to do the first edit for you: out of a long shoot, keep a short roll. It is off until you turn it on, and it needs an account with a vision provider. Read What leaves your Mac before you do.

What it does

It works in two stages, both on the camera’s embedded preview, never on a full RAW development.

1. A local pass, on your Mac. It drops photos that are technically poor, blurred or badly clipped in exposure, and it gathers near-identical frames from a burst, keeping the sharpest few of each. It never decides which photo is good, only which are not obviously bad. At most 80 photos go on.
2. A ranking pass, by a vision model in the cloud. It scores the survivors from 0 to 10 on composition, expression and the moment, with sharpness only as a tie-breaker, and the highest scores are kept.

The number kept is your target: 24 by default, the length of a roll of film.

What leaves your Mac

The second stage sends compressed thumbnails of the surviving photos to the provider you choose: Anthropic (Claude) or Google (Gemini). It is billed to your own account with them, per use. Nothing is sent until you run it, and then only the previews of that run’s candidates. The first stage stays on your Mac.

The same provider also suggests tags for a single photo, from the Editorial tab of the develop panel. That sends that photo’s preview, and only when you ask. Everything else in Reveal stays on your Mac.

If that does not suit you, leave AI culling off. Everything else works without it.

Setting it up

In Settings → Photos, in the AI section. The provider key and model fields stay locked until one of the two switches below is on:

• Vision provider: Anthropic (Claude) or Google (Gemini). It is also the provider for tag suggestions, so there is one choice.
• Vision API key: your key for that provider.
• Model: leave blank for the provider’s default. A value must be a valid model name for that provider or requests fail.
• Photos to keep per session: the target, from 1 to 200. It is applied to each date folder.

Running it

There are two ways.

After every import. Turn on one or both switches:

• Auto-select (story) adds the picks to the folder’s quick collection, as if you had pressed q. It sets no stars. The photos are simply ready, in the preview.
• Auto-export (desktop) develops the picks and exports them as 2048-pixel JPEGs with the white border, into a folder on the Desktop named after the date folder.

On a folder, by hand. Right-click a photo and choose AI culling. It runs on the photos you can see, so filter first if you want to cull only part of a folder. It adds the picks to the quick collection and never removes anything: a photo already in the collection stays there. It works on folders, not on Apple Photos.

While it runs, the work appears in the top bar and in the Activity panel, and a stop button ends it. When it finishes, you are told how many were kept out of how many were considered.

Overruling it

The picks are suggestions in the quick collection, nothing more. Press q on a photo to take it out, or on another to put it in. Your stars are untouched, and so is every photo it did not pick.