Best Free Photo Culling Software for 2021


By Rebecca Bradley

Best Free Photo Culling Software for 2021 

Let’s face it, culling isn’t the most exciting part of the job. I think we can all agree that it is very tedious but it has to be done. To save time going through 1000s of images a fast culling tool is essential. You’re probably thinking “no, not another subscription!” We know how many subscriptions photographers have so we are here to talk about FREE culling tools. 

Why you should use a culling tool over Lightroom 

We should first cover why you should use a culling tool rather than Selecting images in Lightroom. The simple answer is: Lightroom is slow. While you can do things to speed up Lightroom, it’s never going to be fast as a tool that is only designed for culling. Lightroom performs two functions, photo management and photo editing. Doing both of these things requires a powerful computer and the moving around of a lot of data on your hard drive, memory and processor. This more often than not means you are waiting a couple of seconds for each image to load. When you have 1000s of images to go through, this equates to A LOT of time!! 

Using a tool just for culling will allow you to speed through your image selection and only bring images across to Lightroom that you need to edit! 

Cull your photoshoot twice as fast

Get Narrative Select Free on macOS & Windows. No credit card required.

A free culling tool 

A FAST culling tool that is also FREE is Narrative Select. You can cull your photoshoot twice as fast, no wait times to import or navigate through your photoshoots. No low res images and no loading bars. You can make unlimited projects and import unlimited images, zoom into faces with the space bar and ship your images directly to Lightroom! 

If you want to cut your culling time in half and save yourself hours culling images and say goodbye to going through images painfully slow in Lightroom, check out this free culling tool here