Questions about m3cull

m3cull is a free photo culling tool that runs entirely in your browser: it reads photos straight from your card or disk, never uploads them, lets you keep or reject each frame with one key, and exports the keepers.

The basics

What is photo culling?

Culling is the first pass after a shoot: going through every frame and deciding which ones are worth keeping. It is separate from editing.

A wildlife or sports photographer can come home with thousands of near-identical burst frames and keep only a few hundred, so culling is often the slowest part of the whole workflow.

Is m3cull really free?

Yes. m3cull is free, with no account, no trial period, no watermark and no paid tier.

It is in beta while we find out whether photographers want it.

Can I try m3cull without my own photos?

Yes. m3cull includes a sample shoot of 14 public-domain bird photographs from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Choose Try a sample shoot on the home page and you are culling immediately, with no card and no folder needed.

Privacy and your files

Do my photos get uploaded anywhere?

No. m3cull has no server to upload them to.

The browser reads your photos directly from your memory card or drive using the File System Access API, and everything happens on your own machine. There is no account, no cloud processing and no copy of your photographs anywhere but your computer.

Does m3cull change my original photos?

No. Originals are never moved, renamed, overwritten or re-encoded.

Exporting copies your keepers into a folder you choose and leaves the card exactly as it was. Rotation is stored as a change to the EXIF orientation flag on the exported copy, which is lossless and does not touch the image data.

Where are my culling decisions saved?

In your browser, on your own machine, and nowhere else.

m3cull keeps a small database in the browser origin-private file system, so decisions survive a reload and you can come back to a half-finished shoot later. Clearing site data for m3cull deletes them; your photographs are unaffected, because they were never copied there.

Does m3cull work offline?

Not fully. The page itself has to be downloaded, so the first load of a session needs an internet connection.

After that, culling never touches the network again, because your photographs are read from disk and no data is sent anywhere. Offline loading is not built yet.

What works where

Which browsers does m3cull work in?

Chromium-based desktop browsers: Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc and Opera.

Safari and Firefox are not supported, because they do not implement the File System Access API — the thing that lets a web page read a folder of photos without uploading it. Mobile browsers are not supported either.

Does m3cull work on Mac, Windows and Linux?

Yes, on all three.

m3cull runs in the browser, so the operating system does not matter as long as you use a Chromium-based desktop browser. There is nothing to install and no installer to sign.

Does m3cull support RAW files?

Not yet. m3cull currently reads JPEG photos and common video formats: MP4, MOV, WebM, MKV, AVI and M4V.

RAW support is planned but not built, so if you shoot RAW only, m3cull will not help you today. Shooting RAW + JPEG works, because m3cull culls the JPEGs.

How many photos can m3cull handle?

Thousands. The design target is a full card from one outing — roughly 3,000 frames in about 30 minutes of culling.

The next frames are decoded ahead of you, so moving between photos does not wait on disk or decoding.

Using it

What are the keyboard shortcuts?

1 keeps a photo and 2 rejects it, 0 clears the decision.

Compared to other tools

Is m3cull a free alternative to Photo Mechanic?

For culling, yes.

Photo Mechanic costs about $149 a year or $299 outright as of August 2026, and is a desktop application. m3cull is free and runs in a browser tab with nothing to install. Both keep your photographs local, and both leave the choice of keepers to you. Photo Mechanic does far more than culling — RAW, metadata, IPTC — so it is the broader tool.

How is m3cull different from culling in Lightroom?

m3cull does one job.

Lightroom imports and builds previews before you can judge a frame at full size, which is the slow part when there are thousands of them. m3cull opens the folder in place, shows the next photographs before you reach them, and only copies out the keepers. It does not edit, catalogue or develop photographs, so Lightroom is still where the keepers go afterwards.

Does m3cull use AI to pick the keepers?

No. You decide every frame.

Tools such as Aftershoot select keepers automatically; m3cull deliberately does not, because which frame is the good one is the photographer's judgement. m3cull only makes making that judgement faster.

Prices checked August 2026 and liable to change — check theirs before deciding.