Hi everyone, 👋 I'm a hobby photographer and I always come home from shoots with way too many photos. Going through them, picking the keepers, and properly rating and annotating them has always been a bottleneck for me. I used to rely on the free plans of Narrative Select and Mylio. Over time, those free versions got so limited that they just weren't useful to me anymore. I'm also not a fan of paying for subscriptions, so I knew whatever I used next had to be a simple one-time purchase. After struggling to find an alternative that fit my workflow, I realized I already knew exactly what a good photo culling tool actually needed to do. So I decided to just build it myself. The result is PixRater. It's a fast, completely local app designed to take the friction out of culling. It automatically groups RAW and JPEG pairs, evaluates face sharpness so you don't have to manually zoom into every portrait, and uses private local AI to suggest keywords. Most importantly, it doesn't lock you into a closed database. All your ratings and tags are saved directly into standard EXIF and XMP metadata, meaning your organization is future-proof and instantly available in whatever editing software you use next. I also wanted to play around with some new tech, so I added a local MCP server to PixRater. It lets you plug in your own AI tools and basically have a conversation with your photo collection. It's a bit of an experiment, but it turned out to be a lot of fun. I'd love to hear your feedback or answer any questions you might have!

PixRater+

Cull, rate & tag your photos faster

Cull, rate & tag your photos faster