How PixPick culls your photos
PixPick is desktop software that does the first pass of culling for you. Point it at a folder of JPG, HEIC or RAW files and it flags blurry shots, closed eyes, bad exposure and near-duplicates, scores every frame and gives it a 1–5 star rating. You review, adjust, and export. Everything runs on your own computer: photos are never uploaded.
The workflow
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01
Pick a folder
Choose the shoot folder. Sub-folders, RAW and HEIC are supported.
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02
AI analyses
Every photo is checked and scored locally, a few hundred milliseconds each on an ordinary CPU.
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03
Review
Filter by star rating or problem type. Fix any rating with the 1–5 keys, like in Lightroom.
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04
Export
Write star ratings to XMP, or sort keepers into folders with hard links or copies.
What it checks in every photo
Photos that hit any of these problems drop straight to 1 star, so you can review or discard them in one go.
Blur and missed focus
Sharpness is measured with two methods (Laplacian variance and wavelet analysis), so both camera shake and soft focus are caught.
Closed eyes
Faces are located and mapped with 468 landmarks; eye openness is measured for each face. Tiny background faces are ignored.
Focus on the eyes
For portraits, the sharpness of the eye region is checked separately, because a sharp ear with soft eyes is still a miss.
Over- and under-exposure
Clipped highlights and crushed shadows are measured from the histogram.
Near-duplicates and bursts
Similar frames are grouped by perceptual hash. Within each group the best-scoring shots are kept and the rest marked as duplicates.
Empty frames
Shots with no clear subject (accidental shutter presses, lens-cap shots) are flagged.
How the score and stars are worked out
Technical quality
Sharpness, exposure and colour saturation.
Composition
Rule-of-thirds placement, horizon tilt and subjects cut off at the frame edge.
Aesthetics
An open-source CLIP vision model with the LAION aesthetic predictor rates how appealing the image looks.
These combine into a final score, which maps to stars: 85% and up is 5 stars, 75% is 4, 60% is 3, 40% is 2, below that 1. A Strict mode raises every threshold when you need to be tougher, for example on a paid wedding delivery.
Describe the shot you want
Type a description such as "black and white portrait with strong light and shadow" and photos that match it are pushed up the ranking. The same CLIP model reads both your words and the images, on your computer.
Review like in Lightroom
- ← / → to move, 1–5 to rate, 0 to go back to the AI rating
- P to pick, X to reject, F to favourite, Space for 1:1 zoom
- Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y to undo and redo the last 50 actions
- Filter by star rating or by problem: blurred, closed eyes, duplicates…
- Rejected photos go to a recycle bin; your original files are never touched
Export to your editor
- Star ratings written to XMP sidecar files, which Lightroom Classic, Capture One and Bridge can read
- Sort keepers into folders by star rating or category
- Hard links on the same drive (instant, no extra disk space) or copies
Specs
- Platforms
- Windows 10 / 11 (64-bit), macOS
- File formats
- JPG, PNG, TIFF, WebP, HEIC, RAW (CR2, CR3, NEF, ARW, RAF, DNG, ORF, RW2)
- Where it runs
- On your computer. No GPU required. Photos, file names and EXIF are never uploaded.
- Internet
- Only to sign in and check your trial or membership.
- AI models
- YOLOX, YuNet, MediaPipe Face Mesh, OpenCLIP ViT-B/16, LAION aesthetic predictor (all open source)
- Price
- Free 3-day trial with every feature, then a monthly membership
Try it on your last shoot
Every feature is free for 3 days after you sign up.