What’s new

The Bridge and Photo Mechanic basics, a whole day's shoot as one view, a Lightroom sync that asks before it moves anything, and a much faster app on big folders.

• ·Rename photos (their sidecars come along), folders, and whole selections with a Batch Rename shaped like Bridge's (⌘⌥R): text, the current name, a numbered sequence and the capture date, with a preview of the first and last name. Return renames in every view, and every rename undoes
• ·Compare (C): two to four photos side by side. The arrows walk the comparison, and a click zooms all of them to 1:1 together
• ·Copy like the Finder: ⌥-drag onto a folder copies, ⌘V pastes into the open folder, ⌘⇧D duplicates. Sidecars and your marks travel with every copy
• ·Folders: pin favorites at the top of the tree, drag a folder onto another to move it, and Move Folder to Trash. Both undo
• ·Description metadata in the Metadata panel: title, caption, keywords, creator and copyright, for one photo or the whole selection. A JPEG keeps them inside the file; a RAW writes them to its sidecar for Lightroom
• ·Arrange photos by hand (drag in the grid, like Bridge), group your own stacks (⌘G), rotate with ⌘[ and ⌘], and sort by label or file size. Back and Forward move to ⌘⌥[ and ⌘⌥]
• ·Esc clears the filter or the selection, ⌘⇧G goes to any folder, and the All Files list gains a rating column and a right-click menu
• ·Include Subfolders (View menu): a day folder with one folder per photographer culls as one shoot, and every mark still lands in that photographer's own folder. Or ⌘-click several folders in the tree to see them together
• ·Lightroom sync asks before it moves anything in bulk. Keystrokes still sync silently, but a catch-up that would remove a mark, or change more than ten, shows you exactly what it would do first
• ·P sets the pick and ~ toggles it, the way Lightroom splits them, so the key that picked a photo cannot unpick it
• ·Your Edited Preview now reads your develop settings from the Lightroom catalog you sync with, not stale sidecars. On a Nikon Z 9 with its Adobe profile installed, it renders the way Lightroom does, colour and tone
• ·CullMaster never writes a RAW edit back. Develop settings stay where you made them; only flags, stars and labels travel
• ·Source is one menu now: RAW, Auto, or Embedded JPEG. Embedded asks first and names the cameras that would lose resolution
• ·Much faster on big folders: flagging a photo in a 3,000-photo shoot went from about 100 ms to under 10, switching grid and filmstrip is several times quicker, and the filmstrip keeps the selected photo in view
• ·Folders Lightroom creates while it exports appear in the tree as they're made, and a folder's subfolders open with one click
• ·Fixes: the filmstrip no longer jumps back to the first photo, ⌘3 no longer crashes on a large folder, files arriving from a Lightroom export no longer flicker the photo you are on, and the plug-in tells you when Lightroom is still running an older copy

An All Files view, a focus pass that holds the Mac, folder search that opens deeper than Lightroom lets you, and a straight answer about your Lightroom catalog.

• ·All Files (⌘1): the center of the window becomes a Finder-style list of everything in the folder, with name, kind, dates and size, folders first, and Quick Look on Space. The grid is ⌘2 and the filmstrip ⌘3. What the grid shows is marked; everything else is greyed with a count
• ·Your Lightroom catalog now needs your permission. The first time Lightroom opens a catalog, CullMaster asks: Sync with it, or Review only. A catalog you open to look at, an editor's return, a copy you are checking, is left alone entirely: nothing read, nothing written. File ▸ Lightroom Catalogs… lists what CullMaster does and does not do with a catalog, in full
• ·The plug-in explains itself before it installs. A first install shows exactly what it does with a catalog and waits for you to press Install
• ·Focus pass: a locked, timed pass over a shoot. The Mac holds to CullMaster, the folder locks, and one line lands in the shoot's notes when you finish. Optional Pomodoro limits, and the whole thing can be switched off in the View menu
• ·Edit in Lightroom from the Focus control starts the clock, swaps to the companion loupe and takes Lightroom to the folder you were browsing, in one press
• ·Folder search keeps its results, like Lightroom's filter, and goes one better: each result opens to its subfolders, so you can land in a shoot's edit folder straight from the search. Return commits the search, the arrows steer, Esc clears
• ·Ratings and labels are read from the photos themselves. Stars a client-facing JPEG carries from Bridge or a Lightroom export show here with nothing else consulted
• ·Opening a folder is fast again: a migration was rescanning every file on every open, thirty seconds on a large shoot, and now takes a few milliseconds
• ·Finder parity: the folder tree follows every navigation, ⌘⇧N makes a folder from the grid, Copy carries sidecars and says so, and a Lightroom export no longer hides its own folder while it runs
• ·Fixes: Tab hides the whole left panel again, a wrong window could hold the Mac after a pass, and Import into Lightroom of a big folder goes through Lightroom's own importer

GoodEye Labs, a face swap that moves real pixels, and folders that open instantly again.

• ·GoodEye Labs, in the CullMaster Pro menu: optional extras, each explained in plain language and off until you turn it on. CullMaster stays a culling tool — Labs is where anything else lives
• ·Face Swap (Labs): someone blinked, or the wind put a strand of hair across a face, and the next frame is perfect apart from them. Pick the two photos, click the face you want, and it moves onto the frame you are keeping
• ·It is your real pixels, not a generated face — the same head swap a retoucher does by hand, aligned and blended for you. No AI invents anything
• ·Paint the mask with a proper brush: size and hardness with the Photoshop keys, option to erase, a live preview of the brush at its true size, undo and redo per stroke
• ·Export a JPEG, or a layered PSD with the new face on its own masked layer — still editable in Photoshop. Or send it straight to Photoshop without saving anything first
• ·Exported files keep their metadata. Capture time, lens, copyright and the rest now ride through instead of being stripped
• ·Reopening a folder is fast again. A large cache was being counted, repeatedly, in the one place every thumbnail had to pass through — the bigger it grew the slower folders opened
• ·A new folder now opens on its first photo, scrolled to the top, and reopening the app puts the photo you left on at the top of the grid rather than adrift in the middle
• ·Fixes: colours shifting between the original and an edit, thumbnails waiting on housekeeping at launch, and a window that opened at zero width

Find any shoot by typing, Sony focus points, and your Lightroom flags without Lightroom running.

• ·Folder search at the top of the folder panel: start typing and the tree becomes a list of every matching shoot across your whole picture library, newest first, with a running count — click one and you land in it, tree and all
• ·Sort search results by name or date with clickable column headers, and the count tells you how many you shot this year — type a service name and you have the year's tally
• ·Sony focus points: CullMaster now reads the focus position Sony records in ARW files, joining Nikon and Canon. Verified across fifteen bodies, from the a1 and a9 III to the a6400 and ZV-E1
• ·Your Lightroom flags, stars and colour labels now show up even when Lightroom is closed — read straight from your catalog, for any folder, and it finds the right one if you keep more than one catalog
• ·Ratings and labels you set on retouched JPEGs are written into the files themselves, so everything downstream — galleries, proofing, Bridge — sees exactly what you see here
• ·Launch with Lightroom is now off by default, and CullMaster puts itself in your Dock so it is always one click away. Closing the browser window quits the app, the way a window close should
• ·The filter bar is clearer: it says Filter, the count reads in photos, the flag chip wears a proper flag badge, and the camera list stays open while you tick several bodies
• ·Sort moved up to the header beside the view controls, where the things that arrange your photos live, and gained Last modified and File type
• ·Fixes: a lock-up when searching during a big cache sweep, thumbnails not resizing when you hide panels with Tab, and a startup fault that could leave the window half-built

Same-day polish: truer edited previews, honest badges, and a filter bar that breathes.

• ·The edited preview applies your photo's own tone curve point for point, honors saturation and vibrance, and reloads automatically when you save metadata from Lightroom
• ·A MASKED badge appears on photos whose edits use masks or local adjustments — the preview applies global settings only, and now it says so instead of just looking different
• ·Plain words where it matters: the edited preview is an approximation — close, not identical — and the app says exactly that
• ·Browser mode and Lightroom stay fully separate for navigation and caching; flags, stars and labels still sync both ways
• ·The filter bar wraps to a second row instead of clipping, thumbnails rescale to fit, and the names filter is one search field — click it for a full-size editor you can paste a whole client list into
• ·Ratings and labels embedded inside retouched JPEGs read correctly, and folder colours follow Lightroom in both directions
• ·Three header icons — marks, info card, edited preview — gold when on, same as their keys (J, I, A)
• ·Shoot notes from GoodEye Shoot Ingest show beside your photos, and you can add to them right from the metadata panel

A marks bar under every thumbnail, edited previews that read your real Lightroom edits, and a calmer interface.

• ·Every thumbnail carries a clickable marks bar: a flag and five stars that fill in as you click, highlight on hover, scale to fit narrow photos, and take on the photo's colour label. Grid and filmstrip both
• ·Retouched files pass their marks through: ratings and labels embedded inside JPEGs (the way Aftershoot and Photoshop write them) now read exactly as Bridge shows them
• ·A retouched/ subfolder inherits the parent shoot's flags and stars until you mark those photos yourself
• ·Save your final edits from Lightroom (Metadata ▸ Save Metadata to Files) and the edited preview picks up the new settings on its own — photo by photo as you arrow, and the whole shoot when you switch back to the app
• ·The edited preview reads more of your sidecar: your tone curve is applied point for point, and saturation and vibrance are honored
• ·Two new header icons: a wand toggles the edited preview and an ⓘ toggles the info card — gold when on, same as the A and I keys
• ·Folder colours stay in step with Lightroom in both directions: change one there and it updates here, set one here and Lightroom shows it
• ·Options got simpler: one Show focus switch covers the focus crosshair and the focus panel, columns handle themselves, setup actions moved to the Help menu, and Options itself is a quiet gold link in the footer — the header belongs to the Companion / Browser switch
• ·Culling under load feels quicker: background caching floods every core while you step away and steps aside the moment you're actively working
• ·Opening Lightroom after culling with it closed shows one small window only when something truly needs syncing — one button selects the synced photos, and the instructions are correct about flags
• ·The window remembers the exact photo you were on and opens there next launch, thumbnails being cached wear a thin gold working bar, and click-zoom re-aims at the faces on every photo

Undo for everything, and exports that fill in behind Lightroom instead of going black.

• ·⌘Z undoes any mark — flag, stars, label, reject — from the keys, the marks bar, or a menu. A multi-photo gesture is one undo step, and ⇧⌘Z brings it back
• ·Watch a folder while Lightroom exports into it: thumbnails, previews, flags and stars now fill in on their own as each file finishes writing. No more black grid, no relaunch
• ·The same discipline everywhere underneath: the app never caches anything read from a file that's still being written — face tiles, zoom crops, and metadata included
• ·When Lightroom launches CullMaster Pro, it opens as the compact companion instead of covering Lightroom with the full browser — and if the app is already running, opening Lightroom leaves it alone
• ·Quitting the app no longer steers Lightroom to the folder you were browsing
• ·A pasted file-name list now belongs to the shoot you pasted it in — it clears itself when you browse a different shoot instead of silently filtering it

Paste a client's edit list and the app tracks it for you. Plus a slideshow generator and a sturdier full screen.

• ·Client edit requests: paste an email like "1282: cover belly button" (⌘⇧V) and every photo carries its request — in the metadata panel and on the photo itself, with a Mark done button and a running count of what's left. The list lives in edit-requests.txt beside your RAWs, and hand edits round-trip
• ·Paste a ShootProof favorites list (or any file-name list) to filter the shoot to exactly those photos. The parser forgives commas, dashes, #refs, and bare four-digit numbers
• ·Slideshow video export (⌘⇧M): resolution up to 4K or vertical, fit / fill / square framing, per-photo time, crossfade or through-black transitions, Ken Burns motion. Also on the right-click menu for any selection
• ·Switching to LR Companion brings Lightroom forward — launching it if it's closed — and lands it on the folder you were browsing
• ·Flagged photos wear a bright blue border on thumbnails, the preview, full screen, and the ghost filmstrip
• ·Retouch a photo in Photoshop and save over it: the app notices on its own and refreshes the preview and thumbnail
• ·Full screen is sturdier: the photo always fits the screen, the floating faces wrap into columns and grow toward the centre from either side, the faces panel resizes from any edge, and a click zooms to the spot you clicked
• ·Background caching is bolder. It only steps aside for genuinely heavy work like a Lightroom export or an Aftershoot run, and when it does, the footer says so instead of going quiet
• ·Panel layout carries between grid and filmstrip, View ▸ Restore Default Layout brings back the factory arrangement, and a multi-photo selection shows its total size in the header
• ·Hasselblad shoots zoom safely: files are probed in a separate process before the full demosaic, so the Apple decoder bug can't take the app down

Your cloud drives show up, and your hands get faster.

• ·Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive appear in the folder tree — modern cloud drives live in a hidden system folder the tree couldn't reach before
• ·Auto-advance: hold ⇧ with any flag, star, or label to apply it and move on; turn on Caps Lock and every verdict advances, exactly like Lightroom
• ·Home and End jump to the ends of the shoot; Page Up and Page Down page the grid (on laptops that's fn with the arrows)
• ·T flags — the same key Photo Mechanic taggers already know; \ toggles filters like Lightroom; ⌘E opens the selection in your default editor
• ·The ⌘/ shortcut sheet got tabs: the core keys up front, and one-page guides for hands coming from Lightroom, Bridge, or Photo Mechanic

Full-screen becomes a complete culling surface, and the app goes quiet when you do.

• ·Full-screen culling: floating face squares (F) — movable, scalable up to nearly full height, out of the way while you're at 1:1
• ·A ghost filmstrip along the bottom — 5% opacity until you mouse over it, position + full filename readout, flags/labels/rejects on every thumb
• ·TAB in full-screen hides everything but the photo; a faint hint shows the way back
• ·The zoom navigator earns its box: it shows where the 1:1 crop really sits, drag or click it to inspect any part of the photo at 100%, drag the body to move it, the corner to resize it
• ·A toggles the Edited Preview in full-screen; ⌘D + arrows jump to either end of the shoot; X and U work everywhere
• ·Every side panel has a dropdown to swap what it shows — folders, faces, metadata; ⇧TAB swaps folders and faces
• ·⌘⌥P filters to flagged only; right-click a folder for Show in Finder; new sibling folders appear the moment Lightroom creates them
• ·Watching a folder Lightroom exports into no longer reshuffles per file, and idle CPU drops to near zero
• ·Fixed a crash: photos that trip Apple's RAW decoder are probed safely before the Edited Preview touches them

GoodEye Loupe becomes CullMaster Pro — the culling browser is the product, the Lightroom companion is a mode.

• ·Browser mode: open a folder and cull it — grid or filmstrip, full-screen review on SPACE, every face at 100% beside the preview, no Lightroom required
• ·Flags, stars and colour labels with Lightroom's own keys, written to XMP sidecars and synced with the catalog both ways while Lightroom runs
• ·Companion mode is now a fixed window: faces fit the panel, the window stays where you put it
• ·Edited Preview (A): RAWs shown through their sidecar's develop settings, with edited thumbnails to match
• ·Resize & Export (⌘⇧E): batch JPEGs to a folder — RAWs with develop settings export the edited picture, crop included; Open With ▸ any app
• ·Faces detected but hidden as background are counted at the bottom of the panel, and a scale-fair sharpness measure keeps babies and adults on equal footing
• ·Filter bar with live counts, camera menu, selection like Lightroom (⇧-arrow, ⌘⇧-click), Finder-drop to navigate, zoom navigator, cache cost estimated per shoot
• ·Installing over GoodEye Loupe migrates cache, flags and settings; the plug-in is replaced for you and the bridge starts with Lightroom

• ·Rendering is Auto by default: your camera's full-size embedded JPEG where it exists, the true RAW render everywhere else
• ·A camera compatibility grid on the project page — every cell measured on real files, 77 bodies
• ·RAW-only mode stays one click away in options, with the speed difference measured on your own machine

• ·Cache only what Lightroom's filter is showing — filter to your greens and the background work follows
• ·A far deeper look-ahead in your direction of travel, led by a quick pass so fast culling stays warm
• ·Stop and pause caching actually stop and pause, and the footer says so
• ·The cull timer moved into the header as a clickable countdown with its actions right there
• ·Time remaining while a shoot caches, measured from your machine's real pace
• ·Choose RAW or embedded-JPEG rendering, with the speed difference measured on your own renders
• ·Launch with Lightroom is now a setting (on by default)
• ·Groundwork for per-person closed-eye detection: eyes and smiles measured on every face

Photos that trip Apple’s decoder show their faces again.

• No more empty panel on a skipped photo
  0.9.5 stopped those files crashing the app, but skipped them so completely that the panel came up blank — no faces, no explanation, on a photo with people plainly in it. They now render from the camera’s own full-size JPEG, and the header says “camera JPEG” so you know those particular tiles carry the camera’s sharpening rather than the loupe’s.

Updating is one double-click.

• It updates itself now
  Open the disk image and double-click the app. It updates the copy in your Applications folder, closes the running one for you, and reopens when it is done — settings and cached photos kept. Dragging an app across cannot work while it is running: macOS refuses, and this app has no Dock icon to quit from, which made updating harder than installing was.

It stops crashing on certain RAW files, and the plug-in installs itself.

• No more crashes on the odd RAW file
  A small number of Nikon High Efficiency files trip a bug inside Apple’s own RAW decoder, and that kind of failure kills whatever app is decoding — it cannot be caught. The loupe now tries those files in a separate throwaway process first, so one gets quietly skipped, and falls back to the camera’s own preview, instead of taking the app down with it. On one shoot here that was 19 files out of 1,060.
• The Lightroom plug-in installs itself
  There is no longer a button to find. Open the app once and the plug-in is in place; all that is left is restarting Lightroom, which it will tell you about.
• Cache section in options
  How much disk the rendered crops are using, a limit you can change, and what that limit is worth in photos — measured from your own shoots rather than guessed. Collapsed until you want it.
• The cull timer can be abandoned
  “Discard” throws away a pass in progress; “Delete last pass” removes one you already saved, so a run you did while half-watching something else stops skewing your estimate.
• A cleaner panel
  Rounded sections, a proper toolbar with the filename in a recessed field, and bigger controls — closer to the Mac apps it sits beside.
• Now a disk image
  The download is a .dmg that opens with the app beside your Applications folder, rather than a zip that leaves it loose in Downloads.

Faces only, and the cull timer running end to end.

• Faces only
  The panel shows the people it found and nothing else. The extra tiles for the focus point and for the sharpest part of the photo are out of the way unless you want them — uncheck “faces only” in options to bring them back. A photo with nobody in it still shows one, so you are never looking at an empty panel.
• The cull timer, start to finish
  Press Start and a clock appears in the header with a blinking dot, counting the photos you actually land on. Pause, resume, finish. If you tried it in 0.9.3 and nothing happened, this is the build to grab.
• Caching says how far along it is
  “Caching the rest of the shoot, 128 of 584” rather than a bar with no words. You can tell at a glance whether it is nearly done or has barely started.
• Better window manners
  Opening the options no longer resizes the panel, and if you park it against the right edge of your screen it stays planted there as the width changes from photo to photo.

How long does a pass actually take? Now you know.

• Cull timer
  Times a pass through a shoot and counts the photos you land on, not the ones you change — so a pass where you look at four hundred and keep sixty is recorded as four hundred. Stop for more than 30 seconds and it assumes you stepped away. After a few passes it starts telling you roughly how long a shoot will take, from your own history rather than anyone’s guess.
• Reads your colour labels
  Straight from your Lightroom catalog, read-only, so the timer knows whether you are working through everything or just the greens. It opens the catalog read-only at the database level, and is not capable of writing to it.
• Quieter while it works
  The progress bar holds still when it is waiting for a quiet moment rather than pretending to be busy, and the panel no longer says a photo failed when it was simply overtaken by the next one.

Walk away, come back to a shoot that is already cached.

• It caches the whole shoot, not just the photos either side of you
  In the gaps when your machine has capacity to spare. If Lightroom is exporting or building previews it waits and tries again rather than competing with the app you are actually using.
• Cache coverage in the status line
  How many photos are cached and how many are left, so “waiting for a quiet moment” reads as the tool being polite rather than stuck.
• Softer highlights on a bright face
  The roll-off was tuned on real shoots, so the lit half of a face in hard sun keeps its detail instead of going white.

The tone controls, rebuilt around how you already think.

• Exposure in stops
  The same units as Lightroom’s, so +1 means what you expect. It is applied in linear light, which is why a lift no longer takes the tile grey and muddy with it.
• Contrast and midtone are separate controls
  Midtone lifts the middle without touching the ends, so you can open a face up without flattening the photo.
• Auto exposure you can see and switch off
  Metered on each face’s own skin rather than the whole tile, with a marker showing where it landed and a toggle when you would rather set it yourself.
• It renders the way you are travelling
  Arrow forward through a shoot and it renders forward, so the next photo is usually already there.
• A progress strip along the bottom
  So the difference between working and waiting is never a guess.

The first release.

• Every face at 100%: one tile per person
  It follows whatever photo you have selected in Lightroom and crops straight from the RAW, so you can tell whether everyone is sharp without building 1:1 previews.
• Shows where the camera focused
  A gold crosshair, read out of the file itself on Nikon and Canon.
• Focus peaking and live tone sliders
  Preview a change on the photo in front of you, and save it as your default when a shoot naturally sits somewhere else.
• Signed and notarised by Apple
  It opens like any normal app, with a setup guide whose steps tick themselves off as you do them.