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Get through the whole card tonight and start tomorrow with your selects.

Palomino is a fast RAW photo culling app for the Mac. It gets a 2,000-photo wedding, game, or event down to its keepers in one sitting, ready to import into Lightroom or Capture One.

I built Palomino for the part of the job that starts when the shoot ends and a few thousand frames are waiting on the card. Making culling fast is the only job I set out to do. You rate and reject from the keyboard, Palomino copies your selects to a folder, and your editor takes it from there.

Download Palomino on the Mac App Store

Palomino is free to download and exports up to 50 photos per session. Palomino Pro removes the limit for a one-time purchase of $29.99.

It requires macOS 15 Sequoia or later and runs on Apple silicon and Intel Macs.

Palomino grid view of a 70-photo wedding folder, with star ratings, pick flags, rejects, and color labels on the thumbnails and a filter bar that counts picks, rejects, ratings, labels, and underexposed frames
Grid view A wedding folder mid-cull, with stars, picks, rejects, and color labels on the thumbnails.

The pile after every shoot

A shoot ends and the job moves to your desk. A wedding leaves several thousand frames and a couple waiting on their sneak peek. A game shot at 20 frames a second fills a card as quickly, and a day of listings leaves every room bracketed three or five times over. None of the editing or delivery can start until you have been through all of it.

When the cull is slow, it waits. Saturday's card is still sitting there when Tuesday's shoot adds another, and the backlog follows you from one job to the next. Palomino is built to get each card through the first pass the same day, so the next shoot starts with nothing left over from the last.

This app has seriously cut my HB image culling time by 95%.

A photographer, via iMessage

Palomino goes in front of your editor

Keep Lightroom, Capture One, or whatever you edit in now. Palomino makes the first decision about every frame, and your editor handles everything after it.

Open the card

Point Palomino at the card or at the folder you copied it to.

Cull

Rate, pick, and reject from the keyboard. Ratings and labels are written to standard XMP sidecar files.

Hand off

Copy your selects to a folder and import that folder into your editor, and your stars arrive with the files.

Edit and deliver

Your editor builds previews for the frames you kept, so the import is a fraction of the size of the shoot.

What a big shoot looks like in Palomino

I tested Palomino on my own shoots, including a BMX jam in Cupertino: 2,124 RAW files and 116 GB from a Sony A1 II at 50 megapixels, down to a handful of keepers. The recording below shows it working through 100-megapixel Hasselblad X2D II files.

Palomino times every session, so you can check the speed on your own work. Cull your next shoot in the free version, and the session summary shows your total time and photos per minute when you finish. You can also watch the recording on YouTube.

Why the next photo is already on screen

Embedded previews

Your camera already wrote a JPEG preview into each RAW file. Palomino reads that preview instead of decoding the sensor data, which is 10 to 100 times faster and looks identical at normal viewing size.

Prefetching

While you look at one photo, Palomino loads the next one in the background, so it is in memory before you press the arrow key.

Keyboard-first

Press 1 through 5 to rate, P to pick, and X to reject. Each one moves you to the next photo, so you can work through a whole shoot without touching the mouse.

You still choose the keepers

I think choosing which frames are yours belongs to the photographer, and the speed exists so that looking at every frame yourself stays practical on a shoot of several thousand. Palomino puts its effort into never making you wait, and every pick, rating, and reject is one you make.

It still does the sorting that saves you effort. Background analysis flags overexposed, underexposed, soft, and closed-eye frames, and it groups bursts with a crown on the frame it would suggest. You can accept any of those hints with a keystroke or skip past them.

Sports and bursts

A burst is where the choice matters most. At 20 frames a second, the difference between the keeper and the frame next to it is the angle of a wrist or whether the ball has left the hand, and making that call well is part of the craft of shooting sports.

Palomino groups each burst and ranks its frames by sharpness, with a crown on the sharpest. Press C to put two frames side by side, hold one as a reference, and step through the rest of the burst in the other pane. When you agree with the crown, the reject-others shortcut keeps it and rejects the rest of the burst in two keys.

Palomino compare view showing two burst frames of a guitarist playing on a riverside wall, with the reference frame on the left and the challenger on the right
Compare view One pane holds your reference while you browse the rest of the burst in the other, and you can zoom, rate, pick, or promote the challenger without leaving the view.

Weddings, events, school days, and real estate

  • Weddings.

    A wedding means several thousand frames and a lot of faces to check. Press V to zoom straight to the largest face at 300 percent, and a badge marks the frames where someone blinked.

  • Events and school days.

    Event work arrives every week, and a school or team day puts hundreds of subjects into a single session. Sessions reopen exactly where you left off, so a cull you start between jobs picks up at the same frame.

  • Real estate.

    Every room is a set of bracketed frames, and the agent wants the listing up tomorrow. Shift-click a room's set in the grid, pick all of it with one key, and copy only your picks to a folder for your HDR merge.
Palomino preview view of a bride and groom holding glasses of champagne under a green archway, with an info panel that shows an eyes-open badge, an aesthetics score, and a written reason for the frame's rank
Preview view The info panel shows an eyes-open check and the frame's score.

Tools that save time on a large shoot

Filters and labels

Filters control what the arrow keys see, so a second pass through your picks skips every frame you already rejected. Press 6 through 9 to set a red, yellow, green, or blue label, then filter by label, rating, burst, or capture day.

Batch selection

In the grid, hold Command or Shift while clicking to select several photos, and one keystroke rates, flags, or labels all of them with a single undo. A run of obvious rejects clears in one move.

Export

Copy your selects to a folder by flag or minimum star rating. On the same drive, Clone uses an APFS copy-on-write clone and Link creates a hard link, so the export lands in well under a second with no extra disk space and you go straight to editing.

←→move 1–5rate Ppick Xreject Vface zoom Ggrid Ccompare Eexport

Your photos never leave your Mac

I designed Palomino to do its work on your Mac. There are no accounts and no cloud, and your photos, ratings, and folders stay on the machine. The app itself carries no analytics or tracking. The only network activity is Apple handling your Pro purchase, which never involves your photos.

The one piece of data that can ever leave is a debug log, and only when you choose to send it with a bug report.

Pricing

Culling comes back after every shoot, and Palomino Pro is paid for once: $29.99 on the Mac App Store, with no monthly or yearly charge.

Palomino

Free

The free version culls as many photos as you like and exports up to 50 per session, which is enough to time a full cull of your next shoot before you decide.

Palomino Pro

$29.99one-time

Pro removes the export limit, so the whole set of selects from a wedding or a game goes to your editor in one export. Upgrade from inside the app under Settings, then Pro.

Download Palomino on the Mac App Store

Frequently asked questions

Is Palomino free?

Palomino is free to download and use. The free version exports up to 50 photos per session. Palomino Pro removes the export limit for a one-time $29.99 purchase.

Is Palomino Pro a subscription?

Palomino Pro is a one-time $29.99 purchase through the Mac App Store. You pay once, with no monthly or yearly charge.

Does Palomino pick my photos for me?

Palomino leaves every pick to you. Background analysis flags overexposed, underexposed, soft, and closed-eye frames and suggests a keeper in each burst, and you accept or skip each suggestion with one key.

How long will a cull take?

The time depends on the shoot and on how you work, and Palomino measures it for you. When you finish, the session summary shows your total time and photos per minute, so you can compare one shoot with the next.

Do I have to stop using Lightroom or Capture One?

Palomino only culls. Cull in Palomino, then import the folder of selects into Lightroom, Capture One, or any editor that reads XMP, and your ratings and labels come with it.

Can I cull straight from the card?

Yes. Palomino writes nothing to the card. Your ratings are saved on your Mac while you work, and the sidecars are written next to the copies when you copy your selects off the card.

Does Palomino edit or change my photos?

No. Palomino reads your RAW files to show and rate them, and writes ratings and labels to standard XMP sidecar files. It never alters the original image files.

Does Palomino send my photos anywhere?

No. Your photos and ratings never leave your Mac. The app itself has no analytics, tracking, or accounts, and the only data that can leave is a debug log, and only if you save it and send it yourself for a bug report.

What RAW formats does Palomino support?

Palomino supports ARW, DNG, 3FR, NEF, CR3, RAF, ORF, HEIC, JPEG, and more than 20 other formats.

What do I need to run Palomino?

Palomino requires macOS 15 Sequoia or later and runs on both Apple silicon and Intel Macs.

Try it on your next shoot

Open your next card in Palomino, get through it, and look at the session summary when you are done.

Download Palomino on the Mac App Store

Get in touch

I build and support Palomino myself, so a message to any of these addresses reaches me directly.

Support

Email about anything broken, confusing, or not working the way you expect.

support@palomino-app.com

Feedback

Feature requests and ideas are welcome. I read every message myself.

feedback@palomino-app.com

Everything else

Press, partnership, and general questions go here.

info@palomino-app.com