How a 4,812 frame wedding gets culled in 4:22, number by number
We use one wedding for every number on the Kepla site, so that a figure on the pricing page and a figure in the FAQ can never disagree. It is a real day: one 128 GB card, 4,812 frames, copied to two drives while a MacBook Pro M3 Max on battery looked at every frame. This article walks through the whole set of numbers and what each one means for a photographer deciding whether to trust the tool.
One card, 4,812 frames
A full wedding day from one shooter: getting ready, ceremony, portraits, reception. 4,812 frames on a 128 GB card, copied to two drives at 214 MB a second. The copy took 24 minutes 10 seconds. That copy is the one thing every photographer already does on the night, and it is the clock everything else is measured against.
Where the 4,812 went
| Count | Frames | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Cleared | 2,836 | Set aside with one of five reasons printed on the frame. Still on the card and both drives. |
| Clean | 1,880 | Yours to choose from. The app has no opinion about which of these are the good ones. |
| Uncertain | 96 | Blur that might be on purpose. The app asks instead of deciding. |
| Deleted | 0 | And never will be. No file removed, no reject flag written. |
Notice the vocabulary. Counts the app produced are called clean. Counts the photographer produces are called selects, or favourites. The app never produces a select. Of the 1,880 clean frames, a photographer might heart three hundred, and those three hundred are the only numbers that go to the client.
What the 2,836 were cleared for
Every cleared frame carries one of five reasons, and only five: same shot, out of focus, eyes closed, very dark or blown, nobody in frame. On this wedding the three biggest were same shot at 1,204, out of focus at 704, and eyes closed at 407. The reason is printed on the frame, so reviewing every closed eye frame of the day is one filter and thirty seconds of arrow keys, at full size. Press P and any frame is back with the clean ones.
The five reasons are a design decision, not a limitation, and they get their own article.
4:22 against 24:10
Kepla sorted the card in 4 minutes 22 seconds. The copy to two drives took 24 minutes 10 seconds. Sorting finished 19 minutes 48 seconds before the copy did, because the app works in the idle gaps while bytes are moving. That is 1,100 frames a minute, on battery, at 21 W, with nothing uploaded.
For scale: the same day looked at by hand is about four hours at a fast, awake pace of 1,200 frames an hour. A cloud culler's own pages quote forty minutes to three hours for a shoot this size, most of it upload and queue. A tool that decodes every RAW in full lands between 25 and 60 minutes and fights the copy for the disk.
214 frames of 4,812
One number explains the speed more than any other. Every RAW carries a full size JPEG the camera wrote at capture. Kepla reads that JPEG for its first look, which is enough to settle blinks, blur, duplicates and exposure for almost every frame. It opened the real RAW on only 214 of the 4,812, the ones where the JPEG could not settle the answer. Decoding a RAW is up to forty times the work of reading its JPEG, so that one decision is most of the difference between four minutes and forty.
The number to check on your own Mac
The only number that matters to you is whether the sort finishes before your own copy does, on your own Mac, on battery. That is the promise the founding place is built on: shoot one real wedding with it, and if it does not sort faster than you can, you owe nothing and you keep the year. Kepla for Mac is free through the private preview and the first hundred keep it at $99 a year. Request Founding Access.
FAQ
Is the 4,812 frame wedding a real shoot?
Yes. One 128 GB card from a single shooter over a full day, copied to two drives at 214 MB a second while a MacBook Pro M3 Max on battery ran the cull.
Why 96 uncertain frames?
They are frames with blur that could be deliberate, such as intentional motion on a dance floor. The app does not decide taste, so it asks. You answer each one with a key.
Does 0 deleted mean it never touches my files?
It reads your files and writes XMP sidecars beside them. It never deletes, moves or renames a file and never writes a reject flag. The 2,836 cleared frames are still on the card and on both drives.
Will my Mac be as fast?
Speed scales with the machine. The guarantee does not change: if sorting does not finish before your card copy does, on battery, you owe nothing.
Never cull alone at 1 AM again.
Kepla for Mac clears the obvious misses from a card, names the reason on every frame it sets aside, and leaves the choosing to you. Nothing is ever deleted, moved or renamed. Free through the private preview · the first hundred photographers keep it at $99 a year.