2021 was a rough year for photographers on many accounts. But at least one good thing came from 2021—Narrative Select, a brilliant photo culling software. At one point we also recommended Kodak Professional Select as an alternative. It isn’t available anymore—thankfully, Narrative Select is.

It’s the day after a wedding. It was a long night and the dance floor was packed. You’re excited to see the images you’ve captured, and you told your clients to expect sneak peeks soon. It’s time to get started culling. You upload your memory cards, you pour yourself a cup of coffee while they load, and your jaw drops when you realize you’ve captured 5,000 images—of just the dance floor. There are thousands more to sort through to determine which images make it into the final gallery you send your clients. Does this sound familiar? 

Sure, software like Lightroom will help enhance the images you capture, but culling your shots to find the very best options can be a headache. On top of that, once you’ve narrowed down your gallery, the editing marathon begins. That’s really only the beginning of your post-shoot work. Yikes. 

But it doesn’t have to start that way. We found software that uses smart-technology to cull your images in half the time. If it sounds too good to be true, stay with us here. We’re serious when we say that Narrative Select is a gift to wedding photographers everywhere—and thousands of photographers are already using it. 

Who Is Narrative

Narrative is a New Zealand-based software company that builds tools for professional photographers. It was founded by James Broadbent (if his name sounds familiar it’s because he’s James of Chasewild) and Steffan Levet. 

Wedding photographers trying to keep up with their blogs likely already know about Narrative Publish—their first product. If you’re not unfamiliar, Narrative Publish quickly creates blog posts that appear directly on your website with all of your high quality images. After the success of Publish, they realized there was another problem they could help wedding photographers solve—culling. 

Narrative Select’s Powerful Culling Software

Much like blogging, culling images isn’t the fun part of being a wedding photographer and using software can help you spend less time doing it. So, how does this photo culling software work? Select is built from the bottom up to be fast! With a combination of it’s smart features and blazingly fast app, Narrative Select takes the most annoying parts of scouring your images off of your hands. We heard that Select users are culling their photoshoots in half the time!

For example, Select’s automatically detects faces that are out of focus or blinking and marks them so you know at a glance. That’s pretty cool, but it gets better. If you’ve used multiple memory cards—which you should always carry in your gear—uploading images from them can make it hard to piece the story back together. Nope. Not with Select’s Image Assessments, at least. 

This feature organizes your images into scenes, labels the imperfect images in each scene and applies warnings to those images. That way, you can choose to hide all of the images with warning labels. Seeing fewer images is a huge time saver when culling! 

Stop Wasting Your Time

With Narrative Select’s Close-Up feature, you can view closeup crops of everyone’s faces all at once. Imagine never having to zoom in and out or—even better—never getting lost in the zoom of your image again. But, if the closeup options weren’t enough for you, there are also quick-keys to help you navigate a 100% zoom to choose the best shots in a fraction of the time.

Once you’ve assessed the images, made your selections, and are ready to tweak them in Lightroom, they’ve made that easy too. Once your images are selected simply press Ship. They’ll get uploaded to Lightroom instantly. Or if you prefer, you can also drag and drop them into Lightroom. Super fast and super easy, this is the kind of software we all need.

Narrative’s Photo Culling Software Select Gets Rave Reviews

Thousands of wedding photographers love Narrative Select. But you don’t have to take our word for it, we’ll let these photographers share their thoughts themselves.

Save yourself a headache and learn more about what this smart software used by thousands of photographers around the world can do for your workflow. Check out their website to get started for free today.