Photo delivery breaks at scale. The first step after any photoshoot is importing and culling through thousands of images. This process is time-consuming and drains most of your energy.
At 5,000–20,000 photos, most workflows fail quietly, missed expressions, inconsistent picks, and hours of second-guessing. For event, corporate, and sports photographers, culling isn’t an artistic exercise. It’s a delivery-critical operation.
This guide explains how I used FilterPixel Deep Culling (yet to be released) to accurately sort 8,000 photos by understanding context, expressions, emotional weight, story, peak action moments, and timing. The best part is that the deep cull has shown why one photo was selected over another with a reasoning.
It’s the most advanced culling system I’ve used: reasoning-based, transparent in decision-making, and clear about why a photo makes the cut.
FilterPixel Basic Culling is already available to try by signing up on their website.
Deep Culling ( which I tried ) launches on January 20th.
If you’d like to try it, you can request access using the form below. You’ll receive 2,000 photo credits for free to evaluate it on a real shoot.
https://survey.survicate.com/36df5b8f35bfb08d
Before using Deep Culling, my process was painfully familiar.
As a wedding photographer and an overshooter, I regularly cull 8,000 to 10,000 photos per shoot, all inside Lightroom. Honestly, it takes me around two full days to complete, and it’s exhausting.
Narrowing thousands of images down to 600 to 800 final shots is a tough task, usually spread across multiple sessions because of fatigue. I tried outsourcing as well, but that wasn’t a great solution either. It still required effort from my side, follow-ups, reviews, and ultimately added more time to the process.
I also experimented with AI culling tools in the past, but none of them worked for me. They were unreliable and focused mostly on technical checks like blur and blinks, rather than real moments, emotion, and story. In the end, I still had to review everything, which took even longer.
I already had concerns about AI culling tools available in the market, but FilterPixel Deep Culling felt different. Instead of only checking faces, blur, blinks, and expressions which are essentially first-pass checks, Deep Culling evaluates the entire photo in context: the moment, the emotion, and the story that ultimately defines a delivered gallery.
The first step was setting up my rating system. I chose Star Ratings, but you can use flags or labels as well.
Next, I uploaded a folder containing my RAW files (JPEGs also work) and selected the type of shoot. Choosing the right shoot type is extremely important. It influences how the AI selects the best shots and, more importantly, why one image is chosen over another.
I chose Deep Cull because I wanted the highest-quality results.
Basic Cull feels similar to most culling software in the market, fast and technical. Deep Cull, on the other hand, runs in the cloud, uses more advanced models, and is more expensive than Basic Cull, but far more valuable for shoots where quality and delivery timelines matter.
Deep Culling is a reasoning based AI that understands the photos on a deeper level. The score card clearly tells the criteria on which it is selecting the photos. It’s transparent, reliable & damn accurate. Obviously, I can override its decisions. The best part is I don’t have too because it does most of my culling pretty well.
After testing Deep Culling on a full event workflow, I can confidently recommend it to my community. It’s made my delivery faster, more reliable, and far less mentally draining—freeing up time I can reinvest into serving clients and growing my business.