shepherd checks what you'd check first: Focus. Open eyes. The expression. The peak of the movement. shepherd groups similar pictures and recommends a pick. Yet you have the control.
How it works
Point shepherd at the flock of frames in your folder. shepherd works in place and copies nothing.
Bursts collapse, the misses fall away and one is selected.
shepherd proposes, you decide. Cut, keep, rate as favourite.
Stars and labels write as metadata (XMP or the image file). This serves as the handover to your usual editor.
Step 01 · Load
Point shepherd at the flock of frames in your folder.
RAW or JPEG, or both, shepherd works them where they sit.
No upload, no connectivity issues, all local on your device.
shepherd rounds up the whole shoot
Step 02 · Cull
All frames are scored for similarity: color, contrast, time distance. shepherd splits the flock of frames into bursts.
Every frame gets a score with an eye on sharpness, smiles and the peak of the movement. Closed eyes and blurred misses are scored lower.
shepherd sorts the frames in a burst. The best frame of each burst is proposed as a keeper.
You decide at any time whether the bursts stay as they are and which frame is selected as a keeper.
driven into groups and ready for rating
Step 03 · Rate you decide
shepherd proposes. You have the last word. Disagree any time.
One hand on the keyboard using quick shortcuts: keep, cut, or set the stars for your favourites.
You form the herd and your final selection to your taste.
one frame picked out of the flock
Step 04 · Ship
shepherd writes star ratings and markers straight to XMP sidecar files. The original frames stay untouched.
Open your favorite editor like Lightroom, Capture One, or your camera manufacturer's software and your picks are already there.
As an option, shepherd is able to write the metadata directly into the original files, as some editors do not support XMP. The pixels remain untouched, only the metadata is written. On request, shepherd creates a backup for you.
The whole flock of frames is split, sorted, penned and delivered.
XMP written · 13 keepers
5★ × 2 · 4★ × 11
penned into the delivery folder
Why shepherd
Four reasons why shepherd can be the perfect addition to your workflow.
01 · The verdict
Every pick is a suggestion, and you can see what it was based on: sharpness where it matters, whether the eyes are open, the expression, where the movement peaks.
Disagree and one key fixes it. shepherd counts the score and compares.
Which frame is actually good is still your call. It never writes down a decision you haven't confirmed.
02 · The storage location
Everything runs on your computer. Your photos, their filenames and your folder structure stay there. No upload, no account.
Weddings, boudoir, babies and children, hospital work, anything under an NDA: the files stay where you put them. Go offline and carry on culling.
That is also why there is no waiting at the start: no upload, no connectivity issues.
03 · The bill
One price, one payment. No monthly fee, no credits or tokens, no charge per image.
Nothing ticking away while you go back and forth between two frames for the third time.
Two hundred photos or twenty thousand, it costs the same.
04 · The fit
Same program either way. Start with the smallest package.
Take the shooting statistics when you get curious about your own habits. Or if you want to be sure which lens to add to your kit.
Take the local learning once culling is a weekly job rather than an occasional one, and you want to tune the AI to your own taste.
Shooting statistics · Packages: Flock and Range
Every frame remembers what the camera was set to. Read together, a shoot tells you things worth knowing: the focal length you never move off, the lens that stayed in the bag all day, the body that quietly did most of the work.
Focal length, shutter, ISO and aperture across the whole take, or narrowed down to one body or one lens.
Which camera and lens combinations did what share of the work, so a one-sided day with two camera bodies shows itself.
What equipment was in your hand when, from the first frame to the last.
License options
Same program, same analysis in every package. No performance limit, no watermark, no photo limit.
Field
120€
one payment · for all occasions
FAVOURED
Flock
140€
one payment · plus the stats
Range
180€
one payment · and shepherd learns
One year of updates included · major new releases excluded · pay once, in euro
Contact
Questions about a package, an odd camera, a studio licence, or whether shepherd fits the way you work? Write to me. I read and answer everything myself.
hello@shepherd.photoI answer in English and German. I use your address to answer you. Not to put you on a list.
FAQ
No. Your photos, their filenames and your folder structure stay on your disk. shepherd analyses, scores and writes on the machine it's installed on, with no upload and no account, and it culls happily with the network access switched off.
The one thing that talks to a server is the licence: activating your key, and re-confirming it now and then, sends the key and an anonymous device fingerprint. No pictures leave your machine.
Not without a backup. By default your decisions go into XMP sidecar files next to the photos and the originals stay untouched, byte for byte.
If you ask shepherd to write the rating into the file itself, which some editors need because they ignore sidecar files, it copies the untouched original into a backup folder first as a default option. You can put every one of them back.
Yes. Sidecar files and metadata are how these programs already talk to each other: Lightroom, Capture One, Photo Mechanic, Bridge and FastRawViewer all read the stars and colour labels.
shepherd sits before your favourite editor and has no ambition to replace it.
The usual RAW formats from the usual manufacturers, plus JPEG, PNG, TIFF and WebP. By the way, a RAW+JPEG pair of the same shot counts as one photo.
Some metadata that is important for the analysis is missing in some RAW formats. Then shepherd cannot evaluate it. This affects e.g. the focus indicator.
If you shoot something unusual, send me the camera model and I'll tell you straight whether it works.
A normal current laptop or desktop PC. Everything runs on the CPU, so there's no graphics card to buy and nothing falls back to the cloud. More cores means the flock of frames comes in faster as shepherd uses everything which is available by default.
Starting with the package Flock, shepherd can be told to use only some of the resources of your computer so that you can continue working in other programs at the same time.
In the package Range, shepherd learns from your decisions and corrections. The training runs on your computer and does not require any special hardware.
Really. One payment for the package you pick. No monthly fee, no charge per image, no API credits or tokens.
The analysis runs on hardware you already paid for.
By email, as soon as the payment clears. It looks like SHEPHERD-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX. Paste it into shepherd once, under Activate.
The licence doesn't expire and shepherd keeps culling offline. shepherd reaches out to the licence server now and then only to re-confirm the license is still valid.
Field covers one. Flock and Range cover two on one key. Ideal for your desktop and a laptop.
If you replace a machine, release its slot from inside the app and activate the new one.
Then you overrule them. That's just one keystroke, and the shoot is yours again. shepherd never writes down a decision you didn't confirm.
On Range those corrections are exactly what it trains on, on your machine, so it moves towards your eye rather than an average one.
Yes. They're the same program, so moving up a package means paying the difference and nothing else. Write to me and I'll sort it out.