Cull where your photos live.

"Early Access" is about the product's maturity: the app is functional and we use it daily on real shoots, but it's young and moving fast, so expect frequent updates, the occasional rough edge, and a responsive team if something breaks.

As an early buyer you get full Pro features for $99 in your first year, $80 off the $179 Pro price that applies at release. What you're buying is an Annual License with Perpetual Use Rights. At release, pricing becomes two paid tiers:

• Standard, $99/year: the full culling & organizing toolkit.
• Pro, $179/year: everything, plus on-device AI, cloud / network drives, and the pro workflow.
• Loyalty renewal pricing: every renewal is cheaper than the first year and stays there for as long as you keep renewing — $59/year Standard and $99/year Pro. The same rule applies whether you joined at Early Access or at full price. If you let your license lapse for more than 30 days, renewing later starts again at full price.
• Updates during your active term: every release we ship while your license is active is included.
• Perpetual use rights: if you choose not to renew, you keep your last licensed version and we never disable it; you only stop receiving new updates. Because that version stops being updated, we can't guarantee future operating-system releases will still run it.
• Support window: fixes and support cover the current release and the one before it.
• 3 device activations (desktop + laptop + backup). The free 30-day trial is your risk-free evaluation, so purchases are final, though we always help with genuine technical issues and honor refunds where the law requires.

Prefer to try before you buy? The 30-day free trial unlocks the full Pro feature set. No credit card, no account.

Yes, any time. You pay the difference, prorated for whatever is left of your current term, and your renewal date doesn't change. At today's prices that's about $80 to move from Standard to Pro mid-term.

Early Access includes the full Pro feature set, so you renew as Pro, at $99/year. That is the same price you paid for the first year, and it does not change for as long as you keep renewing. Every Pro customer renews on the same terms, whatever they paid first time.

Cullstack is an annual license with perpetual use rights. The version you've licensed keeps working forever, even if you stop renewing. Activation is verified at purchase and re-checked occasionally for refund/fraud protection, but the app continues to function with a long offline grace window. We will publish a final unlock build if we ever wind down the product.

Yes. Each license includes 3 device activations. You can deactivate from a machine you're retiring (Help → Manage License → Deactivate) and free up a slot for a new install. If you've run out of slots due to lost devices, email support@aviastone.com and we'll reset them.

Yes. 10% off for verified students, educators, and registered non-profits. Email sales@aviastone.com with proof of status.

Photo Mechanic is the gold standard for fast metadata-driven culling , particularly for sports and news photographers with deep IPTC workflows. Cullstack focuses on a different problem: helping photographers cull across multiple storage systems without consolidating to local first. We work with NAS, SFTP, Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Photos, iCloud, and your phone in one window.

Yes. Cullstack ships on-device AI helpers: semantic image search ("sunset over water"), face detection, closed-eye flagging, NSFW flagging, and AI auto-stacking by visual similarity, capture-time bursts, or face identity (with optional ArcFace / MobileFaceNet models).

What Cullstack doesn't do is pick your keepers for you. Aftershoot's lane is "give me the AI's picks and I'll refine"; Cullstack's lane is "give me AI hints + the fastest possible cockpit to drive my own cull." If you want the machine to decide, Aftershoot's a better fit. If you want machine-assisted speed but keep the final eye on every frame, that's us.

All models run locally, so no photos ever leave your machine, no Cullstack server in the loop. Compatible with the strictest client NDAs.

No. The interface is available in thirteen languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Cullstack follows your system language on first run, and you can change it any time in Settings. Anything not yet translated falls back to English rather than showing a blank.

Yes, via Live Ingest. Point your camera's tether software, a Wi-Fi/FTP card, or an SD auto-import at a watch folder, and Cullstack imports each new frame the moment it finishes writing , auto-renamed from a template, stamped with your IPTC creator and copyright, and jumped to in the grid so you cull as you shoot. It's the same hot-folder live-ingest workflow Photo Mechanic pioneered, with write-completion detection so a half-transferred frame is never imported truncated.

Cullstack doesn't drive the camera itself (firing the shutter or changing ISO/aperture from the computer). That's full tethered capture, which Capture One and Lightroom handle. For the cull-as-you-shoot workflow most event, studio, and news photographers actually use, Live Ingest covers it.

Yes. There's an AI filter in the grid filter bar with three modes: Any, AI only, and Non-AI only. Photos detected as AI also get a magenta ✦ AI badge in the top-right of their grid cell. Useful for separating client deliverables from moodboard inspiration, auditing a delivery folder before sending, or tagging stock-license-clean photos.

Detection runs in six layers, fastest first, and stops on the first match:

1. Embedded provenance metadata: A1111, Forge, Fooocus, ComfyUI PNGs; A1111 JPEGs/WebPs; Midjourney JPEGs all leave their own tags, and Cullstack reads them.
2. Filename pattern match: DALL-E, ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, Flux, Ideogram, OpenArt, Leonardo, Playground AI, Adobe Firefly, Bing Create, Runway, Imagen, StarryAI, NightCafe + more.
3. Parent folder name: folders called AI, Generated, Renders, etc.
4. C2PA Content Credentials: catches ChatGPT, DALL·E 3, Adobe Firefly, Bing Create, and anything else signed with the C2PA industry standard.
5. EXIF camera-field shape: real photos carry camera Make, Model, ExposureTime, ISO; AI photos almost never do. Combined with format/dimension heuristics (PNG, or sides divisible by 64 ≤ 2048).
6. ONNX visual classifier (optional, described below).

Tiers 1–5 are built in and run automatically. In testing across mixed libraries they catch the large majority of AI photos on their own.

Pick a photo of someone (select it in the grid, or choose a file) and Tools → AI → Find this person filters the grid to their other shots. It matches on facial identity (the geometry of the face), not clothing, pose, or background, so it follows a person across outfit and scene changes. It does need a visible, detectable face: a shot from behind, or with the face turned fully away, won't match. (Requires the two face models listed in the table above.)

The Match slider runs from Loose to Strict. It mostly controls how many true shots of the person you keep, not how many wrong faces sneak in, and different people score far below the same person, so mistaken matches are rare across the whole range:

• Strict (right). Only the most confident matches. Cleanest results, but you may miss harder shots (sharp profiles, poor light, motion blur).
• Loose (left). Casts a wider net and pulls in more of their shots, including tough angles, with little risk of look-alikes, since strangers sit well outside the range.

A good workflow: leave it at the balanced default, then nudge it toward Loose if a few shots you expected are missing, or toward Strict if you want only the surest matches. Hit Clear to drop the filter.

All connections live in one place: open Connection → Manage Connections…, then click the button for the backend you want: Add WebDAV…, Add SFTP…, Add Dropbox…, Add OneDrive…, or Add Google Photos…. Fill in the fields, save, then Connect. Each profile becomes its own branch in the sidebar tree (☁ WebDAV, 🔒 SFTP, 📦 Dropbox, ☁ OneDrive, 📷 Google Photos) and you can browse, copy, move, and stack across them the same as a local folder.

• Dropbox: one-click OAuth. Choose Dropbox, give the profile a label, click Authorize, approve in your browser. Tokens stay on your machine; we never see them.
• OneDrive: same OAuth flow as Dropbox. Choose OneDrive → Authorize → sign in with your Microsoft account. Works with personal Microsoft accounts; work or school (Microsoft 365) accounts may need your organization’s administrator to approve the connection first.
• Google Photos: one-click OAuth, but it works a little differently. Choose Google Photos → Authorize → sign in with Google, then pick the photos and videos you want in the browser window that opens. Cullstack only sees the items you select, not your entire library, which is Google’s privacy-first Picker design. To add more later, open the connection and pick again. It’s read-only: Cullstack never modifies, moves, or deletes anything in Google Photos.
• WebDAV: server URL (https://… or http://…), username, password. Toggle Bypass SSL certificate verification only if you're connecting to a self-signed-cert NAS on your own LAN. Works with Nextcloud, ownCloud, Synology WebDAV, Box (with WebDAV enabled), and any standards-compliant server.
• SFTP: host, port (default 22), username, and either a password or a private key file. Keys must be in OpenSSH format (~/.ssh/id_ed25519); PuTTY .ppk keys aren't read directly, convert one first with PuTTYgen (Conversions → Export OpenSSH key). An optional passphrase unlocks encrypted keys.
• iCloud: no setup needed. iCloud Drive appears as a normal folder under your macOS home directory (~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs) . Just navigate to it in the sidebar tree like any other local folder. iCloud Photos surfaces automatically on macOS as the iCloud Photos sidebar entry once you grant Photos library access on first launch.

Connection details are stored on your own machine, in ~/.cullstack/connections.json, readable only by your user account. Passwords, key passphrases and the OAuth tokens for Dropbox and OneDrive are encrypted in that file with a key tied to the machine, so a copy of the file taken elsewhere — in a backup, a synced folder, or a cloned home folder — will not open. An optional master password (Settings ▸ General) guards the connection manager, so nobody at your unlocked computer can open it and read a saved password back. To be plain about the limit: because connecting has to work without prompting you, software already running as you on this machine could read those secrets, which is true of any app that reconnects on its own. For the most sensitive servers we still recommend SSH key authentication with a passphrase you type at connect time. Cullstack never relays any credential through an Aviastone server.

Plain drag-and-drop in Cullstack copies by default, the safer choice for photo workflows, since the original always stays put. Hold Shift (or ⌘ on macOS / Ctrl on Windows) at the start of the drag to move instead. This applies to every backend: local folders, network drives (WebDAV/SFTP), and cloud (Dropbox/OneDrive). External drags in from Finder or Explorer follow the OS's own copy-vs-move conventions.

Every model is an optional one-click download from Settings → AI → Plug-Ins, and each row names its licence before you install it. Nothing is bundled in the installer and nothing runs until you ask for it.

Full model list, licences, and how to use your own — including the ONNX requirements if you want to install a detector we do not ship.

Cullstack reads your photos from wherever they already live: we never copy them to a Cullstack server. Ratings, tags, and collections are stored in a local database on your machine, and Cullstack can write standard XMP sidecars next to your photos so Lightroom, Bridge, and Photo Mechanic can read them. No telemetry, no cloud sync.

No. Cullstack reads and writes your photos where they already live: local drives, your NAS, your own SFTP / WebDAV server, or the cloud accounts you authenticate. Nothing is uploaded to a Cullstack-controlled server. This is a contractual win for wedding and portrait photographers whose NDAs prohibit transmitting images to third-party services.