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.
Fast by default, full RAW when you want it
Open a folder and your shots are simply there. Seula shows the full-size preview your camera embedded in each RAW, so there is no import step and no render wait, even with thousands of frames from a long burst. And when you want the full accuracy of a rendered RAW, Seula shows that too. Speed for the first pass, precision when it counts.
Cull at the speed of one keystroke
Stars, color labels, and pick or reject flags are each a single key. Switch on auto-advance and Seula jumps to the next frame as you rate, so you can run a whole shoot without ever reaching for the mouse.
See exactly where the focus landed
Zoom to 100% for critical focus, turn on focus peaking to see what is sharp at a glance, or overlay the camera’s own autofocus points to see precisely where it locked on. That is often the whole difference between a keeper and a near miss.
Settle the close calls
When several frames look almost identical, set them side by side in Compare, or lay a whole burst out together in Survey, and pick the winner. The fastest way to answer “which one of these?”.
Your picks come with you
Everything you rate is written as standard XMP, so your stars, labels, and flags are simply there when you open the shoot in Lightroom, Capture One, or anything else that reads it. No exporting, no sidecar wrangling.
Everything else you’d expect
A live histogram and the full EXIF behind every frame, filtering by any mix of rating, color, and flag, JPEG and RAW handled as one shot, and a clean interface that follows your system light or dark theme.
Non-destructive, and private by design
Your ratings never touch the pixels; they live in standard metadata beside the file. And nothing you do in Seula ever leaves your Mac.
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.