Find the keepers, fast.
Seula is a fast tool for culling photos: the first pass, where you sift a shoot down to the shots worth keeping.
A native app for macOS. Free for personal use.
Seula is built to do one job well. It’s not a photo editor and not a library manager. It sits before those tools. Shoot, cull in Seula, then edit your picks in Lightroom, Capture One, or anything else that reads XMP.
First pass through big shoots
Seula is built for the part where photography gets repetitive: hundreds or thousands of frames, burst sequences, near-duplicates, RAW files, JPEGs, and RAW+JPEG pairs in the same folder. It keeps the session moving, handles mixed folders cleanly, and gives you a simple, natural flow for browsing, comparing, rating, and rejecting images.
Make the first pass count
Stars, color labels, and pick or reject flags are written as compatible metadata, so the choices you make in Seula come with the photos when you import them into Lightroom, Capture One, or another XMP-aware editor. Do the fast first pass in Seula, then spend less time sorting in the heavier app.
See exactly where the focus landed
Zoom in as far as you need and keep moving through the set. Focus peaking helps you spot what is sharp, autofocus point overlays show where the camera locked on, and Compare mode makes close calls easier to judge side by side.
Settle the close calls
Use Survey mode to spread out a burst or sequence and quickly remove the obvious misses. When the remaining frames are too close to call, Compare keeps the contenders side by side so you can judge expression, pose, motion, and focus in detail.
Decisions your editor can read
Seula stores your ratings, color labels, and flags as standard XMP metadata, embedded in JPEGs or in sidecar files when needed. Lightroom, Capture One, and other XMP-aware tools can pick up those decisions when you move on to editing.
Minimal, but not rigid
Rebind shortcuts, hide UI elements you do not need, and keep Seula focused on the way you prefer to cull. After the selection is done, batch renaming helps give the remaining files consistent names before they move on.
Non-destructive, and private by design
Seula never edits the image pixels. It only reads your photos and, when you choose to, writes metadata or performs local file operations such as renaming. There are no accounts, analytics, telemetry, uploads, or server-side processing.
Every feature, no limits, no trial, and not a thing locked behind a paywall.
Using Seula in professional work? There’s an honor-based one-time license for €14.95, but every feature stays available to everyone, paid or not.