Seula
Seula app icon

Find the keepers, fast.

The shoot is over quickly. Culling the thousands of frames it leaves is not. Seula is built for exactly that: to make the cull smooth, and even enjoyable.

or download it directly

Free for personal use. Requires macOS 12 or later.

The Seula viewer showing a full-screen photo with the rating bar at the bottom and the filmstrip along the edge.

Seula is not a photo editor or a library manager. It is what you use before them, and the marks made while culling carry straight into Lightroom, Capture One or anything else that reads XMP.

Wildlife Event & wedding Sports & bursts RAW shooters Stars · colors · flags

Large, mixed folders

Seula opens a folder straight from disk: no import, no library. Thousands of frames, bursts and RAW+JPEG pairs stay responsive, and each pair reads as a single photo.

The Seula browser filling instantly with a grid of thumbnails from a freshly opened folder.

A burst is one card, not a hundred frames

Consecutive frames are grouped into a stack by capture time and by image content, so a burst reads as one card. Burst Review then steps through the stacks: pick the keepers, and the rest are rejected in one undoable action. Bursts and stacks →

Checking sharpness

Zoom in as far as the detail requires. Focus peaking marks what is sharp, and autofocus point overlays show where the camera focused. Focus peaking →

A photo at 100% with green focus peaking highlighting the in-focus details.

When frames are nearly identical

Survey lays out a burst at once, so the obvious misses go quickly. Compare puts the rest side by side, and Blink Compare switches between two frames at the same zoom and position. Survey and Compare →

Compare mode showing two similar frames side by side, one marked as reference.

Your marks travel to the editor

Stars, color labels and pick or reject flags are written as standard XMP, which Lightroom, Capture One and other XMP-aware tools read. Batch renaming gives the keepers consistent names when you are done. Metadata and compatibility →

The viewer’s on-screen rating bar showing stars, the color swatches, and the pick and reject flags.

HDR photos as they were captured

Gain-map photos and Canon and Sony HEIF files are shown at full brightness on a display with the headroom for it, so the brightest parts rise above white. Tonal-range warnings mark blown highlights and blocked shadows on the image itself.

RAW files
Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, OM System and Olympus, Panasonic, Pentax, Leica, Hasselblad, Phase One, Sigma and others
Other formats
JPEG, HEIC, PNG, TIFF, DNG and practically every other image format in common use
Requirements
macOS 12 or later. Universal: Apple silicon and Intel

Non-destructive, and private by design

Seula never edits your pixels. It reads your photos and, when you ask it to, writes metadata or renames files. A Live Photo’s photo and video stay one item, so nothing is left orphaned. No accounts, analytics, telemetry, uploads or server-side processing.

No analytics or tracking No accounts No files uploaded, ever Standard XMP your editor reads

Read the privacy policy →

Free! (for personal use)

Every feature, no limits, no trial, and not a thing locked behind a paywall.

Every feature is available. The Mac App Store version offers an optional professional-use purchase through Apple.