New release of Snapselect from Macphun

If you bought Snapselect on the App Store after reading the initial and followup Quick Looks, be advised that V1.1 is out.  Your Mac may not be set to auto update and if not, you definitely want this update in your machine.  As they promised, the folks at Macphun have improved the user interface, particularly to help serious photographers and editors who want to use Snapselect in conjunction with Lightroom or Aperture.  If you have not bought it yet, today might be the day.  Do note that like all Macphun software, it is Mac only. I ran into some snags getting it to see images inside folders inside my existing Lightroom catalog, but getting to images in folders or on a card was no problem at all.  I was able to read folders from my Lightroom catalog with a different set of images.  So the issue could have been something to do with the first set being images from a Canon EOS-M.   You can also browse by Collection, a tool that I use all the time, but be aware that with this release Snapselect can only deal with top level collections, not collections stored inside Collection Sets.  While I find this inconvenient, I think it is fair to recall that Snapselect is designed to cull before you go through the whole import and collection building process.

I am not sure which RAW converter Snapselect is using, I suspect it may be the OS X native one.  What I found interesting is that Snapselect was able to open folders and browse images including EXIF and histogram for Hasselblad's proprietary 3FR RAW format.  Photo Mechanic cannot do that and neither can the DXO tools.

Loading of an example folder of 500+ images took just over one minute, including the analysis phase.  The "similar" function is very effective.  I used a folder from a recent hockey game shoot and was very impressed by how the software gathered like images together as there were numerous burst mode sets of breakaways or glove saves.   The timeline view shows the images as they were captured, but as I noted in the third 7D Mk II review, the save sequence with the SD card looks like last frame in the burst first, instead of first to last.

It's also handy to be able to group shots into time intervals.  I used the default example of 5 minute blocks and it really simplifies the edit process.  You only need to know two keys Z is a pick, X is a reject.  This is very quick but inconsistent with the Lightroom Pick/Reject keyset.  I don't see these as reassignable at this point.

While there are other options such as a the much richer and much more expensive Photo Mechanic, Snapselect could very well be the culling program for the majority.  It is fast, easy to use and benefits from the talents of the Macphun developers.  If you shoot more than 100 images in a session, you need a culling tool and at $25, this is perfect, but buy it while it is on sale for $14.99 and you really cannot lose.

Followup on Snapselect Quick Look

I am always appreciative when a representative of the company making a product I take a look at makes the time to respond.  Kevin of Macphun sent a quick comment to yesterday's quick look and I wanted to share his thoughts with all of you, particularly his clarification of how Snapselect DOES integrate with Lightroom.  I missed this and really appreciate the opportunity to learn. Here are Kevin's thoughts direct from his reply..

1. It actually works well as a nice companion to Lightroom. You simply open up your LR catalog in Snapselect (as an image source vs. opening a folder), then any selects / rejects are automatically reflected back in Lightroom in two new Collections – Snapselect Picks and Snapselect Rejects. Opening up either of these Collections enables you to then do anything to the images that you would customarily do in LR (e.g. tag, keyword, edit, delete, etc.)

2. Can you do the culling process in LR? Of course (e.g. via flags, stars or keywords). Where Snapselect shines however is greatly speeding up that task by analyzing and presenting you with neat groups of similar images – then you’re laser-focused on culling *those* before turning attention to the unique images from your session.

You can read the other elements of what Kevin had to say in the Comments section, mostly they add on his thanks for the article and how his own workflow has changed.

This is one of the many reasons I like the people and products from Macphun.  They are directly engaged with the customer and are not some faceless corp-droid, not to name any G companies.

New from Macphun - Snapselect

The very nice folks at Macphun are announcing a new photo sorting application.  Like all their software it is Mac only and like some of their software it is sold only the Apple App Store.  It's on limited time sale for $14.99 and sadly you cannot buy it through my affiliate link, only through the App Store.  So let's check out what it does and why it is sold the way it is.As you may be aware, Macphun was built by a bunch of really talented folks who had been originally at Nik Software before it was acquired by Google.  Most of the really brilliant Nik apps and plugins were built involving the people now at Macphun. Macphun has three tiers of apps.   The first tier is the seemingly bottomless pit of mobile device applications.  We know that one of the drivers for Google to buy Nik was the amazing Snapseed.  Well Macphun still does smartphone apps, specifically Color Strokes, FX Studio, Perfect Photo and Vintagio.  They are very good smartphone installed apps.  I don't cover that marketplace but you can read the reviews and the pricing is excellent.

The second tier is the consumer market, where the apps are sold only on the App Store.  It is here that we find the first set of Mac OS X apps like Tonality, Colorstrokes, FX Photo Studio, Snapheal, Intensify,  and Lost Photos.  These are all standalone apps with good functionality at competitive standalone app prices.  This is where Snapselect lives as well.

Lastly are the Pro apps, meant for the more serious photographer / editor.  This is where we find the Pro versions of some of the consumer apps.  They work standalone as well as as plugins to Lightroom and Photoshop.  More features, tighter integrations, more demanding use cases.

Ok, Snapselect.

We've all been in the situation where we have hundreds or thousands of images to go through to cull out the keepers.  The usual route has been to import them to Lightroom or copy all the files to disk and then go through them one by one using some method to select the junk and delete it right away and perhaps at the same time to do some ranking for future work using some other flag system.  Pros have typically resorted to the brilliant and very expensive Photo Mechanic.  Snapselect aims to do this at the consumer level.  Now let's be clear that comparing Snapselect to Photo Mechanic is unfair to both offerings, they are not even in the same species.

With Snapselect you open all the images on the card or hard drive and go through them using a click metaphor to decide what you are going to keep or trash.  Snapselect also uses algorithms to group duplicate or "like" images together, so if you shot 76 photos of the cougar at the zoo, it plunks them all together to make the sorting easier.

Once you've gleaned the images, you can move them to specific folders on your hard disk or push them directly to social media like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.

The theory then is that you could then import the keepers into your photo management application from the folders and start to work on them.  Snapselect reviews suggest that it works with Lightroom but doesn't really.  I'm not surprised.  A Snapselect Pro (which may appear) might do that more effectively but I really don't see this as an app for the sophisticated photographer / editor.  Got a zillion images from your smartphone to sort through?  That's the fit for Snapselect, or really any use case where you don't do serious photo management.

Research says it is 2-3 seconds per RAW image to render the previews to make the keep/delete decision.  I can get that kind of performance out of Lightroom.  I can also use the X key in Lightroom to flag a photo for deletion then quickly from the menu delete all so marked images.  If I want blazing culling speed, I will use Photo Mechanic.  Lightroom has improved render performance in the last couple of releases, and while it is nowhere near the speed of Photo Mechanic, delivers RAW performance akin to Snapselect, so if you are already a Lightroom user, why add more complexity?

So if you shoot mostly JPEGs and don't do any kind of automated photo management (meaning you manually build folder hierarchy on your drives), have a tendency not to cull and end up consuming storage, this app is for you.  If you are already committed to a management application and know how to leverage its own culling process, this may be too simplistic and too hard to integrate into your workflow.

Good for Macphun continuing to build interesting software.