Guide
Cull 2,000 wedding photos in an hour
A full wedding card runs to about two thousand frames, and about two hundred of them ship. Sorting one from the other by staring at a grid takes an afternoon. In Obscura Studio the same job takes about an hour, in five steps: upload, analyze, flag, section, trash.
Upload the whole card, then Analyze
Make one session and drop the entire card in, RAW or JPEG. There is no need to sort into folders first; the app does that later. When the upload finishes, press Analyze. It scores every frame for sharpness and exposure, groups near-duplicates, and seeds a Best set. That first pass catches the technical failures before anyone looks at them.
Work the grid with three flags
Pick, Reject, Best. Pick is a solid frame that could ship. Reject is out. Best is the top five to ten percent, the frames that carry the day. Speed matters more than certainty here: no zooming unless a frame is in doubt, and the first reaction is usually the right one. Ten to fifteen frames a minute is a normal pace.
Filter, then section
Filter the grid to Picks and promote the strongest to Best. Then filter to Best and read it as a story. Suggest sections splits the day into moments (getting ready, ceremony, portraits, reception); anything it gets wrong drags to the right place. Sections are what the client sees, so this step is delivery work, not busywork.
Trash the rejects
Select the rejects and delete them. They go to the session Trash, which keeps them for 30 days, so a mistake costs a click, not a photo.
The time budget
| Step | Minutes | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Upload | 5 | Whole card into one session |
| Analyze | 3 | Press the button; it scores and groups |
| Flag the grid | 30 | Pick, Reject, Best at ten to fifteen frames a minute |
| Refine Picks | 10 | Filter to Picks, promote to Best |
| Sections | 7 | Suggest sections, fix the misses |
| Trash and check | 5 | Delete rejects, one last pass through Best |
| Total | 60 |
Three rules of thumb
- Closed eyes are a Reject unless the moment is worth more than the face.
- Unintended motion blur is a Reject. Deliberate blur is a Pick.
- Near-duplicates: keep the sharpest one and reject the rest. Analyze groups them.
Why culling comes first
Every minute of editing spent on a frame that will not ship is wasted. Culling first means grading two hundred photos instead of two thousand, and the look stays consistent because it is built on the frames that matter. The edit gets shorter and better at the same time.
Checked September 6, 2026.