Facet vs OptiCull

Facet is a free, local tool for scoring, culling, organizing, and serving a web gallery for photo libraries. It runs on the user's machine without cloud services, accounts, or API keys. Its scoring evaluates nine dimensions, including aesthetic quality, composition, sharpness, color, exposure, face quality, subject saliency, and dynamic range. It detects bursts, similar photos, blinks, and duplicates, with a dry-run preview for automatic culling. The gallery includes natural-language semantic search, filters, timeline and map views, albums, and themed slideshows. Face tools group people and support searching, renaming, merging, and organizing clusters. XMP sidecars provide metadata interoperability with Lightroom, Capture One, digiKam, and darktable. Users can send photos to a WebDAV inbox, or share revocable album links that need no recipient login; proofing supports hearts and comments, with an optional PIN. Core functions work on CPU, while an NVIDIA GPU unlocks additional models and features. Facet can be installed with Docker or natively on Linux and macOS, requires Python, and does not provide RAW editing or development.

OptiCull is a macOS app for selecting photos from a shoot, with manual comparison and automated assistance. It groups duplicates into scenes for side-by-side review, with adjustable grouping preferences and synchronized zoom on a face, all faces, or an image region. Magi-Cull can identify blurry photos or blinking subjects and suggest varied keepers based on user preferences; users can override its assessments. During import, the app can read from an SD card, identify photo sessions, apply custom naming patterns, and analyze images while copying. Selected photos can be sent to Lightroom Classic, Lightroom CC, Capture One, Apple Photos, and other Mac apps following Apple's standard file-import guidelines. The maker says photos stay on the local machine and AI processing runs on-device, though account, purchase, usage, and diagnostic data may be collected. OptiCull supports JPG, RAW+JPG, and RAW formats supported by the host macOS version. It requires macOS 11.0 or later and can run with 8GB RAM. Hobbyist is free; Pro is listed at $79.99, paid once.