You may have noticed that AI technology has made its way into the photography industry in many incredible ways over the past few years.
But it really came in hot with this time-saving culling program I just got my hands on called FilterPixel.
FilterPixel is one of those programs that do the culling for you. Just sit back, relax, and let the program work its AI magic to detect poor focus, blinking eyes, and more.
FREE DOWNLOAD
Feature-rich software for automatically selecting your best photos. Render photos 10x faster than Adobe Lightroom thanks to cloud-based automation.
FilterPixel is a photo culling application that uses Artificial Intelligence to cull for you.
Yes, you heard me right. It doesn’t just organize your photos and make culling faster. It literally culls for you, too.
It takes a lot of the mind-numbing monotony out of the average photo selecting routine by automatically assigning rejection tags to photos that have undesirable traits, such as poor focus or closed eyes.
It also groups similar photos from the same scene together and selects what it believes to be the very best of each set.
And sure, a lot of other culling programs do those things, too.
But what makes FilterPixel truly stand out from the rest is that it does everything entirely on its own cloud servers.
This gives your RAM and CPU a rest and allows you to get your culling down at speeds beyond your computer’s capabilities, and that’s definitely unique to FilterPixel!
Features
I have to mention this first because it’s just so unique! Cloud-based automation truly separates FilterPixel from the rest.
FilterPixel runs its automation on its GPU cloud servers, which allows you to cull beyond your personal machine’s capabilities.
Competitor AI culling programs are fully dependent on your computer’s processing power, such as its RAM and CPU.
If you find that rendering photos and going from one image to the next during the culling process is incredibly slow, you’re really going to want to look into FilterPixel.
If I could include a photo of their cloud server to give this blurb the attention it deserves, I would. But unfortunately, it is someplace else far, far from me. You’ll just have to imagine it!
As for your privacy, FilterPixel makes it very clear about information collection on their website:
“The images collected by FilterPixel App are low-resolution thumbnails that will be used solely for the purposes of training the Machine Learning models used in FilterPixel. These images will never be reproduced, resold, or redistributed in any manner and you can contact us at any time to have them deleted forever. You can disable the settings in FilterPixel App Account settings option that will stop collecting any photos on our servers. You can also reach out to us to delete any of your photos anytime.”
So yeah, there’s no need to worry about anything privacy and data security-related when using FilterPixel.
Save two extra clicks per photo by not having to zoom in manually, because FilterPixel’s Faces panel does it for you.
This feature is a banger when it comes to group photos or moments like the above where your subject is off in the distance and it’s difficult to really tell if they’re in focus.
Directly next to the Faces tab, you’ll find Details. This panel is freaking sweet because it lays everything out for you (and looks good doing it, I might add).
Details shows you the tags it gave the image, as well as focus and eye quality scores. It also shows the photo’s metadata. Basically, all the information you could ever need about one single photo is right here in this panel. We love that!
Quickly compare your duplicate images by tapping the [C] button on your keyboard.
You can use the arrows to cycle through each photo in the scene.
This feature also boasts zoomed faces and meters for focus and eye quality
Of all the culling tools I’ve used, this one seems to be pretty unique to FilterPixel.
It makes it easier than ever to choose the very best frame in a group of duplicates.
FilterPixel’s Filtering options truly go above and beyond and are absolutely mind-blowing!
Not only does the program automatically assign tags to images such as “High-Quality Eyes” or “Perfect Focus,” but it even allows you to filter by actions and more.
If I select “dancing”, for example, it shows me every photo from the shoot where Lindsey and Matt are dancing.
Amazingly, there is even a tag for “intentionally closed eyes”!
I always say that the eyes closed function on these culling apps is pretty hit or miss when you’re documenting spontaneous moments with laughter and kissing, but FilterPixel has a pretty decent judge of when the closed eyes are intentional. Or if you’re subject is just wearing sunglasses!
While the AI detection isn’t 100% spot on every time, it’s pretty accurate in most instances and is always being updated and improved by FilterPixel.
You can sort photos by a specific percentage of focus and eye quality. If you want to hide all photos from view that do not exceed at least, say, a 50% quality score in focus or eye quality (e.g. blinks and poor focus), you can use these little sliders to do so.
All this helps to keep your screen organised and not overwhelming, which really helps in the culling process.
Overall Performance
FilterPixel thrives on speed as a result of its cloud-based automation. When working with CR2 files, it culls and applies filters to even the largest galleries in just minutes.
However, it falls short on speed when it comes to the large RAW files, such as the CR3 files that come from my new Canon R5s.
Understandably, when I attempted to cull a wedding gallery of 3,500 CR3s in FilterPixel, it had difficulty rendering photo previews.
But in fairness, the average person’s editing machine doesn’t handle CR3 files in a timely manner either, which is why I invested in a totally maxed out iMac this past summer with all the bells and whistles.
If you’re working on a bit of a potato and rocking “normal-sized” RAW files, such as CR2 and NEF, you’re going to have an awesome experience with FilterPixel.
But don’t fret, fellow megapixel chasers. FilterPixel is always working to improve and update.
Rest assured they are working to ensure those .CR3s are better supported soon!
Alternatives to FilterPixel
- Narrative Select also gives you ratings on eye and focus quality, and even provides zoom-ed in faces. However, it doesn’t automatically cull your photos for you. I love this tool personally, but it definitely requires a bit more manual review than FilterPixel.
- AfterShoot also does the culling for you and performs quickly. However, it functions off your machine rather than a cloud, so you miss out on any speed benefits therein.
- Photo Mechanic was the O.G. photo culling software that caused a global meltdown across the industry years back. While it’s still undoubtedly lightning-fast and great for high-volume photographers, it lacks any of the AI magic.
- Adobe Bridge, included in Adobe Photography Creative Cloud subscriptions, is another external tool you can use for selecting images before you ship them to Lightroom. It has its benefits but feels a little clunky and dated at times.
Value for Money
As with most culling programs, there is a free option with FilterPixel too – you can get the perks of cloud-based manual culling without paying a dime.
The free trial lasts for 14 days and includes 10,000 photos – more than enough to see if it’s right for you.
However, if you want the cool AI features to kick in, you’ll need to look at the paid plans.
At around $120 annually for its standard plan and roughly $180 for its pro plan, FilterPixel sits right in the average to high price point for similar AI culling programs.
You also might factor in how much money you might be saving not needing to upgrade your machine to something that can handle fast culling since all the culling goes down on FilterPixel’s cloud anyway.
FilterPixel Coupon Code
The guys at FilterPixel have provided Shotkit readers with a generous 20% discount on all plans – just use the coupon code Shotkit20 at checkout.
FilterPixel Review | Conclusion
It can be really difficult for me to keep an open mind when it comes to switching up my culling process with a new program.
After spending some time with FilterPixel, however, I can assure you it is a pretty intuitive and unique program.
I am a huge fan of their stand out innovation when it comes to their cloud-based service. It truly separates FilterPixel from its competitors and makes it incredibly enticing, especially for photographers who haven’t upgraded their machines in quite some time.
For photographers like me who went the R5 route and are constantly working with files that are a million and a half megapixels, other alternatives are preferable – I will not be using FilterPixel as my primary culling program for this reason.
However, if I was still working with Canon’s more common CR2 files, it may have been a different story!
For everyone else, I would highly recommend giving FilterPixel a go. The trial is free, so you have no excuse not to!
FREE DOWNLOAD
Feature-rich software for automatically selecting your best photos. Render photos 10x faster than Adobe Lightroom thanks to cloud-based automation.
Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post – we received compensation to write it, but all recommendations are entirely impartial and based on the experiences of the author, with no bias toward the products or the brand. In other words, you can trust what we say 🙂
