Tack: AI Photo Culling for Wildlife Photographers
A desktop app that finds your sharpest wildlife shots by detecting animal eyes — something no other AI culler can do.
Learn More at wildlifecull.com →The Problem: AI Photo Culling Doesn't Work for Wildlife
Wildlife photographers routinely shoot 500-5,000+ images per session. Manual culling takes hours: looking at each image, checking eye sharpness at 100% zoom.
Existing AI culling tools (Aftershoot, FilterPixel, Photo Mechanic Plus) are trained exclusively on wedding and portrait photography. They look for human faces and eyes but they literally don't know where a bird's eye is.
When bird and wildlife photographers try these tools, they get random results or everything marked as "no face detected." This is a fundamental training data problem. These companies have zero incentive to fix it because wildlife is a tiny market compared to weddings.
"I tried Aftershoot on 800 images of herons. It found zero eyes. Not because the birds' eyes were soft — because it doesn't know what a bird eye looks like."
Tack: Built From Scratch for Wildlife
Tack is a desktop application (Mac, Windows, Linux) that runs locally with no cloud upload, no privacy concerns. It uses specialized ML models trained specifically on animal anatomy, not repurposed portrait AI.
The only AI photo culler for wildlife that knows where a bird's eye is.
- Detects where the animal's eye is in the frame
- Measures sharpness specifically on the eye region
- Classifies images into Sharp and Not Sharp columns
- Writes XMP sidecar files for Lightroom/Capture One
- Images appear pre-flagged as Picks or Rejects
- Supports all major RAW formats plus JPEG
Simple Workflow
Select folder → Wait a few minutes → Review → Import to Lightroom with culling done.
- Select Folder — Point the app at a folder of wildlife photos
- Automatic Analysis — App detects animal eyes and scores sharpness on each image
- Review Results — Images sorted into Sharp vs Not Sharp columns. Move any the AI got wrong.
- Export to Lightroom — Click a button, app writes XMP sidecars. Open folder in Lightroom — images already have Pick/Reject flags.
What used to take 2-3 hours now takes 5 minutes of review.
Perpetual License, Not Another Subscription
The app works forever with a perpetual license. Your first year of updates and support is included. After that, $39/year gets you continued updates but if you don't renew, your version keeps working.
Photographers are exhausted by subscriptions. This model aligns incentives: we have to keep shipping valuable updates to earn renewals.
What's Coming
Near-Term
Keyboard shortcuts for rapid review, drag-and-drop folder selection, dark mode, GPU acceleration.
Medium-Term
Lightroom Classic plugin, burst sequence detection (auto-pick sharpest from a burst), watch folder mode.
Long-Term
Species identification, behavior detection (wings spread, feeding, fighting).
Why I Built This
I'm a wildlife photographer who experienced the culling problem firsthand. I tried existing AI culling tools and watched them fail completely on bird and wildlife photos.
With an AI/ML background, I recognized this as a tractable problem with a clear market gap. I researched the wildlife photography community — forums, Reddit, YouTube — and confirmed the frustration was widespread.
No one was building a wildlife photo culling tool for this niche because it's small compared to weddings. But it's still tens of thousands of serious photographers with a real need.
I built Tack to scratch my own itch, and to see if a focused, niche product could find its market.