WHO WRITES THIS SITE
Osmel Contreras
I shoot, and I cull my own work. Kepla is the tool I wrote because the second half of that sentence was eating my week. Everything on this blog is written from that chair.
THE WORK
I am the photographer this
software was written for.
I shoot weddings and events. On the smaller jobs I offload cards at the venue before I leave; the 2,000 to 3,000 frame ones come home and go onto macOS. Then comes the part nobody books you for: sitting with the whole take and deciding what survives.
That is the job Kepla does the first pass of. Not the deciding. The part before it, where you are throwing out frames that were never going to make it and you already know it by the time the preview draws.
WHY I WROTE IT
Every culling tool wanted
to have the taste for me.
The tools I tried all pointed at the same promise: let the software pick your keepers. I did not want that, and I do not think you do either. The frames I argue with are the ones worth arguing with. Handing those to a model is handing over the only part of the work that is actually mine.
So Kepla is built the other way round. It clears what is plainly unusable and names the reason on each one. Every frame it sets aside stays on your card, stays visible, and stays yours to overrule. It clears. You select. There is no ranking of your favourites, and no profile of your taste.
THE BAR I SET
90%
minimum agreement with my own cull · 95% is the target
Zero
false rejects on hero frames · a missed hero is the one failure that matters
Read only
on the card, always · nothing deleted, moved or renamed
HOW IT IS BUILT
On your machine,
on your own silicon.
I wrote the engine on the native Apple stack, running on the Neural Engine, on device. Your frames are not uploaded anywhere to be looked at, because they never leave the machine in the first place. That was a design constraint before it was a marketing line: I did not want to hand a client gallery to a server, and I would not ask you to either.
Kepla is strictly read only on the card. It does not delete, move, rename, or write a reject flag to your files. If it is wrong, nothing has been lost, which is the only honest way to ship a first pass.
ABOUT THIS BLOG
Written by someone who has
actually sat through the cull.
The guides here compare tools I have used, including the ones competing with mine, and they cite the vendors directly so you can check the claim rather than take my word. Where Kepla is not yet the right answer, the comparisons say so.
How the numbers on this site were measured, what Kepla is not allowed to claim yet, how these posts are produced and what happens when something turns out wrong, are all set out on one page. How we work →
GET IN TOUCH
Tell me where it gets it wrong.
If Kepla clears a frame it had no business clearing, that is the bug I most want to hear about. Send it to me directly.