krites¶
Take the 3,000–4,000 frames from a full day's wedding shoot and judge them — cull the unusable, rank the rest, then auto-correct and lightly retouch the keepers — straight from a local browser studio.
“KREE-tees” · from Greek κριτής, “the judge” · a bespoke, private alternative to AI culling services, tailored to the photographer's own 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 → export, with Lightroom XMP sidecars, all reviewable in the local studio. The heavy providers (face/eye, aesthetic scoring, inpainting) ship off by default and are opt-in per capability. The learning loop that adapts to your keep/reject history is still ahead, with no release date. Before you commit to krites, read what it does not do.
What krites does¶
It runs the whole post-shoot pipeline — cull → develop → retouch → remove → export — over a single shoot:
- Culls at scale — flags out-of-focus / motion blur, bad exposure, closed eyes & blinks, and near-duplicate bursts, giving every frame a keep / maybe / reject verdict with reasons for you to confirm.
- Auto-corrects the keepers — straighten, composition crop, a colour look, and light retouching.
- Removes unwanted objects from a scene by inpainting.
- Stays non-destructive — originals are never touched; every decision is a reversible record, rendered only on export.
- Local-first & private — a wedding's photos stay on your Mac by default.
- Fits Lightroom — reads/writes XMP sidecars, so a krites cull shows up in your Lightroom catalog (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 owns the originals, decisions, and exports.
Documentation¶
These docs follow the Diátaxis framework:
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Install krites and cull your first shoot.
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Learning-oriented, end-to-end lessons — 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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Exhaustive facts — 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, 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.