Lumen — Photo Culling

Lumen turns the drive home into the cull. Rate, reject and compare a whole shoot on your phone or iPad, then hand the decisions to your desktop. Your ratings arrive in Lightroom Classic, Capture One or Bridge as standard XMP sidecars — so the work you did in the car is not work you do again at the desk. NOTHING LEAVES YOUR DEVICE Every competing culling app uploads your images to a server. Lumen has no server. No account, no login, no analytics, no crash reporting. Your clients' images are read from your photo library and stay there. That is not a policy — it is the architecture. The only thing that ever needs the network is fetching your own iCloud photos, which iOS does for you. For photographers working under a GDPR obligation: there is no processor to name and no data processing agreement to sign, because there is no processing. SHOOTS FIND THEMSELVES You never create a shoot. Lumen groups your frames by when and where they were taken — a gap of more than 90 minutes starts a new roll, and two sessions at the same venue on the same day become one. Bursts collapse to a single frame. Both thresholds are yours to tune. And Lumen does not adopt your camera roll: you choose what comes in. Or skip the inferring entirely — tap Select photos, choose the frames you mean, and they arrive as a single roll, never re-sorted into the days they happen to have been shot on. THE CULL A full-bleed frame on near-black, and nothing else until you ask for it. • Swipe up to rate, again to add a star. A rising haptic ramp means you can feel which star you landed on without looking away. • Swipe down to reject. The frame goes grey and dims — it does not vanish, because you need to be able to take it back. • Press and hold for a 100% loupe that follows your finger, with focus peaking in brass. • Two-finger tap for 2-up or 4-up compare, zoom and pan synchronised across every tile. • On iPad with a keyboard: 1–5 to rate, X to reject, arrows to move, Z for the loupe. TELL ME WHICH FRAMES ARE UNUSABLE Lumen measures every frame on your device: sharpness, clipped highlights and shadows, and whether anyone blinked. Sharpness is normalised per roll, so a foggy morning is judged against itself rather than against a studio. Near-identical frames are grouped into stacks with a nominated keeper — a suggestion, marked as one, and Lumen never rates a frame for you. DELIVERY • XMP sidecars named after your original camera files, so they land next to your RAWs. • cull.csv, for everything XMP cannot carry. • JPEG sets at 1080, 2048, 4096 or full size, with an optional watermark and metadata stripping — so a client preview does not carry the shoot's GPS coordinates. • Zip archives and a contact-sheet PDF. Or just a new album in Photos. FREE AND PRO Free, forever: every roll, unlimited rating and rejecting, the light table, compare, the loupe, focus peaking, filters, and exporting your selects to a Photos album. Lumen Pro adds the delivery formats — XMP, CSV, JPEG, zip, contact sheets, watermarking — plus stacks, suggested keepers and the technical triage sort. If Pro lapses, every rating and measurement stays where it is, and stays exportable. Your work is never held hostage. SUBSCRIPTIONS AND TERMS Lumen Pro is an auto-renewable subscription — monthly or yearly, the yearly plan beginning with one week free — or Lumen Pro, for good, a one-off purchase that never renews. Prices are shown in your own currency before anything is bought. Payment is charged to your Apple Account at confirmation of purchase. A subscription renews for the same period at the same price unless cancelled at least 24 hours before the current period ends. Manage or cancel in Settings › your name › Subscriptions. Privacy policy: https://hbj-solutions.com/legal/lumen#privacy Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/ Requires iOS 26 or iPadOS 26.