Photo culling, on your iPhone.
Culling means keeping the best and letting go of the rest. It used to require a desktop, an import, and a free evening. SpectraSort runs the whole workflow on the phone your photos are already on, and it ranks every frame before you swipe a single one.
Why culling exists
Photographers cull because a shoot always produces more frames than it should deliver. You shoot 500 and hand over 40. A camera roll has the same math and none of the tooling: a two-week trip comes home as 1,200 photos, and the built-in way to deal with them is scrolling.
Desktop tools solved this for working photographers, with ratings, side-by-side compares, and keyboard-speed review. Your camera roll lives somewhere else. SpectraSort rebuilds that workflow for the phone, and adds something the desktop tools never had: the frames show up already ranked.
The review starts at the top of the pile.
Point a sort at a trip, a scene, or a search, and every frame comes back scored for sharpness, exposure and composition. Ask it to, and it will also weigh how much each photo looks like the ones you usually keep. The strongest frames are on top before you've made a single decision.
The first sort builds an index on the phone, at up to 100 photos a second on recent iPhones. Later sorts run against that index and finish in a moment, even across thousands of photos.
If you want different criteria, Studio has seven quality axes, a wheel that trades subject match against quality, and profiles you can save.
Nineteen takes of one moment cost one decision.
Near-identical shots are what make manual culls slow, because every extra take is another comparison. SpectraSort groups duplicates, bursts and look-alikes into stacks before the review starts.
A stack sits on a single wheel. You roll through the takes without leaving the photo, keep the one you want, and the stack is done. The screenshot is from a real pass: the same rose, 19 takes, one wheel.
Then the swipes: right to pick, down to keep, left to let go. Or let Autopick sort the slice and just skim what it chose.
The fine print
Indexing, scoring and the taste profile all run on the iPhone's Neural Engine. Nothing gets uploaded and there's no account. More on how that works →
- Your decisions are still the slow part. SpectraSort shortens the review; it doesn't make the calls for you unless you use Autopick, and even then nothing happens until you tap.
- iPhone only, iOS 18.5 or later. No iPad, Android or desktop version.
- The first index of a big library takes a while. It only happens once.
- Deleted photos spend 30 days in iOS's Recently Deleted album, so the storage comes back later, not right away. SpectraSort doesn't show a “GB freed” number because it would be a guess.
Free to try. $19.99 once to keep.
Five sorts a week are free, forever, with no account and no credit card. Premium is a single $19.99 purchase that removes the cap and unlocks Studio. No subscription, ever. Built by an indie dev who uses it daily.
Download on the App Store