🦊 fox-cull

A fast, lightweight photo & video culler for Windows, macOS & Linux. Sort through thousands of photos quickly — keep the good ones, reject the rest — without a subscription, without the bloat.

Website: https://kumaradarsh1993.github.io/fox-cull/

Stable downloads:

Platform	Download
Windows	fox-cull setup.exe
macOS (Apple Silicon)	fox-cull.dmg
Linux	fox-cull AppImage

Beta builds and older releases

fox-cull is built for the part of photography nobody enjoys: the first pass through a huge pile of shots from your phone and camera, deciding what's worth keeping. It borrows the workflow you already know from Lightroom — a folder list, a big preview, a film-strip along the bottom, star ratings and color labels — and does just that one job, fast.

Your photos are never modified. fox-cull reads your files where they sit (on your drive or an external SSD) and remembers your ratings in its own database. Nothing is imported, copied, or written next to your originals until you choose to delete the rejects — and even then they go to the Recycle Bin / Trash, so they're recoverable.

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What it does

• Browse any folder in place — point it at a drive or folder and it shows the whole tree. Pick a folder and you see every photo inside it and its subfolders, all at once.
• Three ways to look — Grid (adjustable thumbnail size), Details (name / type / size / date list, like a file explorer), and Focus (one big photo) — switch any time, top-left.
• Rate, flag, and tag at speed — star ratings (1–5), color labels, a keep/reject flag, and your own free-form tags (e.g. "Diwali"), all from the keyboard. Filter by any of them.
• Sort & group by real capture date — order by the date a shot was actually taken (from EXIF / video metadata), not the filename, and optionally split the grid into month or week sections.
• Big, clean preview with a Lightroom-style film-strip (bottom, side, or off — and drag to resize it). New photos fade in sharp from a soft preview — no jarring thumbnail-to-full pop.
• Right-click anything for a contextual menu — open in your file manager or system player, jump to the next/previous shot, pick / reject, copy the path.
• Dim / lights-out focus mode (L) darkens everything but the photo.
• Photos always upright — no more sideways portrait shots from your phone.
• Fast on huge phone JPEGs — thumbnails decode at reduced scale and the whole folder pre-loads in the background, so scrolling stays smooth.
• Handles RAW — Nikon .NEF and other RAW files preview instantly.
• Real video support — every clip gets a true poster frame, an in-app player with a scrub timeline (hover to preview frames), and lossless trim & export (set in/out points, cut without re-encoding). HEVC clips (e.g. DJI Osmo Pocket 3) still get posters and scrubbing, and open in your system player in one click if the webview can't decode them. Space plays/pauses, Shift+←/→ seeks.
• Filter, then bulk-reject — e.g. show everything below 3 stars, select all, reject, then sweep the rejects to the Recycle Bin in one go.
• Per-drive & portable — each drive keeps its own catalog, preview cache and recycle bin together in a _FoxCull folder at its root, so your ratings and deletions travel with the drive between machines. The app itself can run portable from a USB stick / SSD too (see below). See STORAGE.md for exactly what's stored where.

Download & install

Grab the latest build from the Releases page:

• Windows — fox-cull_*_x64-setup.exe. On first launch Windows SmartScreen may warn (the app isn't code-signed yet): click More info → Run anyway.
• macOS (Apple Silicon) — fox-cull_*_aarch64.dmg. It isn't notarized yet, so on first launch right-click the app → Open, then confirm. (If macOS says it's "damaged", open Terminal and run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/fox-cull.app.)
• Linux — .AppImage (portable) or .deb.
• Windows portable — fox-cull_*_x64_portable.zip. Unzip anywhere (e.g. onto your SSD). It contains fox-cull.exe and a fox-cull-data folder; keep them together and the app stores its catalog, cache and settings in that folder instead of in Windows AppData — so the whole app travels with you. (Needs the Microsoft WebView2 runtime, which ships with Windows 10/11.)

How to cull

1. Click Folder… (top-left) and choose the folder or drive with your photos.
2. Click a folder in the tree — the grid fills with everything inside it.
3. Use the keyboard to fly through:

Key	Action
← / →	Previous / next photo
Enter	Toggle big Focus view
G / D	Grid / Details view
L	Dim → lights-out → normal (focus mode)
Space	Play / pause the current video
Shift+← / Shift+→	Scrub the video back / forward
1–5	Star rating
`	Clear rating
6 7 8 9 0	Color label (blue / purple / red / green / yellow)
X	Reject
P	Pick (keep)
U	Clear everything on this photo

4. Use the filter bar to narrow down (e.g. only rejected, 3+ stars, or a tag), Select all, and Reject them in bulk. Add a tag to the selected photo(s) by typing in the + tag box in the bottom info bar.
5. When you're ready, hold the Delete button to sweep the rejects. By default they go to the in-app Trash (a _FoxCull/recycle folder on that drive) — open ♻ Trash any time to preview them, restore one to its original spot, or delete forever. Prefer the OS bin? Switch "On delete" to System Recycle Bin in Settings (⚙).

Tip: ⊞ Subfolders (in the Filters menu, on by default) controls whether a folder shows photos from its subfolders too. Use the Sort and Group controls next to the view switcher to order by capture date or split the grid into month / week sections.

Good to know

• Ratings live in fox-cull only. They're stored in the app's own catalog (a _FoxCull folder on each drive), not written into your photo files, so they won't show up in other apps and won't touch your originals. Because the catalog lives on the drive, it backs up with your photos and follows the drive to another computer. Full details: STORAGE.md.
• Read-only drives: if a drive is mounted read-only (e.g. an NTFS SSD on a Mac without a write driver), culling and rating still work — only the final delete sweep is disabled, with a note explaining why.
• Big RAW / very-high-resolution photos take a moment to preview the first time; after that they're cached and instant.

Build from source

fox-cull is built with Tauri 2 + SvelteKit + Rust.

npm install
npm run tauri dev      # run locally

Tagged releases (v*) build Windows, macOS, and Linux installers automatically via GitHub Actions.

License

MIT © Kumar Adarsh