Cull photos on your NAS
For photographers who keep their archive on a Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS, Unraid or home server.
Most photo tools expect your shoot on the computer in front of you. If it lives on a NAS, that usually means copying gigabytes over the network before you can even look at it. Cullstack works the other way round: open the folder on the NAS and start culling, with nothing copied first.
How fast it is
- About 3 seconds for a folder of 98 RAW files from 20 different cameras to fill with thumbnails, straight from a network drive on a wired home network, with nothing cached beforehand. Open it again and it is instant.
- 100,000 photos listed in about 14 seconds, with the first ones on screen in under a second.
- Measured on a 2015-era quad-core Intel desktop running macOS, so a newer computer does better.
The workflow
- Connect the NAS. Mount its shared folder the usual way (Finder’s Connect to Server on a Mac, a mapped network drive on Windows, a network mount on Linux) and it appears in Cullstack’s sidebar like any drive. Pro can also connect straight to a server over SFTP or WebDAV, with no mounting at all.
- Find the shoot. Browse folders, or turn on Include Subfolders to see a whole year at once. Build Cache prepares thumbnails ahead of time, so even a huge archive opens instantly afterwards.
- Cull in place. Rate, flag and color-label right on the NAS. The ratings are written next to the photos, so they stay with the files.
- Take the keepers to your SSD. Filter to your picks and copy them to your computer’s fast drive for editing. The rejects never leave the NAS.
The NAS is the place to find and sort; your SSD is the place to edit. Cullstack makes the first part fast, so only the photos worth editing travel over the network.
What works on a NAS
- Every format Cullstack reads: RAW from most cameras, JPEG, HEIC, TIFF, PSD, WebP and PNG, and video.
- On-device AI (Pro): closed-eye and blur flagging, similar-shot stacks and search by description, without uploading anything.
- Duplicate finding across a folder and its subfolders, exact copies or visually similar shots.
Which version you need
- Free: browse a mounted NAS share, view full screen, compare and color-label.
- Standard: adds ratings, flags, tags, the full culling mode and the rest of the culling toolkit.
- Pro: adds direct SFTP and WebDAV connections, cloud drives, and the on-device AI.
The 30-day trial unlocks everything, with no credit card.
See also: Cullstack as a Photo Mechanic alternative · An Aftershoot alternative without a subscription · Cull before you import into Lightroom.