krites¶
Take the 3,000 to 4,000 frames from a full day's wedding shoot and judge them: cull the unusable, give every frame a verdict with its reasons, then straighten and crop the keepers, all from a local browser studio.
"KREE-tees" · from Greek κριτής, "the judge" · a private alternative to AI culling services, built for one photographer's taste
Status: in active development
The core pipeline is built and released: ingest, cull (blur, exposure, eyes, near-duplicate bursts), develop (straighten, crop, look), object removal and export, with Lightroom XMP sidecars, all reviewable in the local studio. The heavy providers (face and eye analysis, object removal, the AI review) ship off, and each is switched on separately. The look catalog holds only a neutral pass-through so far, and the learning loop that would adapt the cull to your keep and reject history is designed but not started, with no release date. Before you commit to krites, read what it does not do.
What krites does¶
It runs the post-shoot pipeline over one shoot at a time, cull, develop, remove, export:
- Culls at scale. It flags out-of-focus and motion-blurred frames, bad exposure and near-duplicate bursts, and, with face analysis switched on, closed eyes and blinks. Every frame gets a keep, maybe or reject verdict with its reasons, for you to confirm or override.
- Corrects the keepers. Straighten and a composition crop, plus a colour look (only the neutral one exists so far).
- Removes unwanted objects from a scene by inpainting, once you switch it on and accept the model's licence terms.
- Never touches the originals. Every decision is a record you can reset, and
pixels are rendered only by
export. - Keeps the photos on your machine. Analysis and inpainting run locally; the optional AI review is the one feature that sends a frame anywhere.
- Fits Lightroom. It writes XMP sidecars beside your originals, carrying each verdict, crop and straighten angle, so the cull appears when Lightroom imports them. Cull in krites, finish in Lightroom.
It's built on go-tool-base, ships as a single Go binary, and keeps no state of its own: the shoot directory holds the originals, the decisions and the exports.
Documentation¶
These docs follow the Diátaxis framework:
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Install krites and cull your first shoot.
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End-to-end lessons that take a shoot from import to export.
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Task-focused recipes: remove an object, export for Lightroom, run the studio, enable face/eye analysis, tune a cull profile.
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Every CLI command and every configuration key.
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How krites works and why: the non-destructive shoot, the analysis cache, the provider seams and the pipeline.
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The boundaries, stated: what is a settled design decision, and what is simply not built yet.
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Ways of working, the roadmap, and where the design records live.
Further reading¶
Everything written about the estate, including the curated guides, is on the blog.
Ask phpbotscout
He answers questions about the projects over on the Discord, citing the docs where they already cover it, and offering to raise an issue where they don't. Bring a bug, an idea, or a questionable engineering decision.