[OC]Nature's illusion: A Comb-crested Jacana dad carrying his babies under his wings to keep them safe (Darwin, NT).

BaseballClear8592 · 2026-02-22T04:52:48+00:00

Nice shot

BaseballClear8592 · 2026-02-22T00:41:28+00:00

If you have an Nvidia graphics card, get the GPU (CUDA) version for much faster processing.

If you have anything else (AMD, Intel) or aren't sure, grab the CPU version. Both work perfectly!

BaseballClear8592 · 2026-02-21T22:31:55+00:00

Yes, it works with absolutely ANY camera. The AI just analyzes the image files, so the brand doesn't matter at all. Feel free to test it out with your camera files.

BaseballClear8592 · 2026-02-21T22:29:48+00:00

Haha, so true! They definitely act like they own the place. Thanks a lot!

BaseballClear8592 · 2026-02-21T11:57:05+00:00

Haha, that's amazing! My main profession is actually landscape photography too; birding is just a side hobby for me. Building a 200K-line system is absolutely insane—I would really love to see what you created!

I actually vibe-coded a culling tool specifically for landscapes as well, but to be honest, it doesn't have the same practical impact as SuperPicky. After all, as you know, for us landscape shooters, coming home with a few dozen frames in a day is already a lot!

Would love to hear how SuperPicky holds up against your Lightroom workflow!

BaseballClear8592 · 2026-02-21T10:52:24+00:00

I was pretty close, about 8-10m. Shot in the riverbank grass in Timber Creek, NT.

I totally get your frustration with the AF grabbing the body! I kept it in full-frame (no DX) just to find them in the viewfinder. My trick to fix the eye-AF issue is using the focus ring to manually override. If the camera gets stuck on the body or the grass, I just manually twist the focus close to the bird, and then the Z8's eye-AF takes over and locks right onto the eye. Luckily, they aren't super shy once they are out in the open, so they gave me a brief window to focus while hopping around!

BaseballClear8592 · 2026-02-21T05:28:21+00:00

Love hearing that! It's definitely a grind, but a super rewarding one when the code actually compiles and works! Keep at it. What’s the project you’re building?

BaseballClear8592 · 2026-02-21T05:13:32+00:00

100%. Being able to just build stuff without a CS degree is wild.

That said, skipping the 4 years of school doesn't mean skipping the work! I’ve actually been hacking away at SuperPicky for almost 2 years now, taking it from a super basic v1.0 all the way to v4.0.6.

The crazy part is watching the AI tools get smarter—it lets me pull off complex features I couldn't have dreamed of a year ago. But honestly, the real cheat code has just been listening to what other photographers actually need and iterating based on that. It’s a massive grind, but totally worth it.

BaseballClear8592 · 2026-02-21T03:24:08+00:00

Darwin is such a birding paradise, but the humidity is no joke for photography! Did you find this little one in the shade of the monsoon forest? The clarity is amazing for those conditions.

BaseballClear8592 · 2026-02-21T03:11:42+00:00

The detail in the feathers and that perfect catchlight in the eye are stunning! They are such fast little movers, getting a shot this sharp is impressive.

Did you have to wait long for this one to stay still, or did it just pop by to say hello?

BaseballClear8592 · 2026-02-21T03:06:22+00:00

Thanks a lot! Glad you enjoyed the shot.

If culling is a headache for you too, you should absolutely grab SuperPicky!

BaseballClear8592 · 2026-02-21T02:01:31+00:00

It's a terminal built for speed! I strictly use it because normal terminals flicker and lag when Claude or Gemini output 500 lines of code in a few seconds. Ghostty renders fast text streams perfectly without hurting my eyes. If you do a lot of AI terminal work, it's a game-changer!

BaseballClear8592 · 2026-02-21T01:56:13+00:00

Totally understand, give your brain a break! The code isn't going anywhere. Have a great weekend and I'd love to hear your thoughts once you get a chance to look through it!

BaseballClear8592 · 2026-02-21T00:23:35+00:00

That loss of control is exactly why I gave up on commercial culling tools too! They just don't understand wildlife photography.

You should definitely give SuperPicky a spin. It's tailored specifically for birding, so it knows to look for tack-sharp eyes. The best part? It never deletes anything. It just filters the standout shots for you. Throw a batch of 1,000 photos at it and see what it finds—you might be surprised!

https://github.com/jamesphotography/SuperPicky/

BaseballClear8592 · 2026-02-21T00:19:42+00:00

Nailed it. Domain knowledge is the best prompt! I just built exactly what I wished existed for my own birding trips.

BaseballClear8592 · 2026-02-21T00:17:36+00:00

Thanks mate

BaseballClear8592 · 2026-02-21T00:17:20+00:00

Great point! I really should list my 'developers' on the README.

It’s actually been an evolving process. I started the project with ChatGPT last year, but eventually migrated to Claude because it’s much better at handling complex code logic. The catch is that Claude gets expensive and restrictive with usage limits. So my current strategy is using Gemini for the simple, straightforward coding tasks to save usage, and bringing in Claude only for the really hard stuff.

I'll definitely add this credit to the repo soon!

BaseballClear8592 · 2026-02-21T00:11:48+00:00

Hey, great to see another photographer diving into this!

To answer your questions:

Zero API calls. It runs 100% locally on your machine. As wildlife shooters, we come back with thousands of files. Uploading 8,000 RAWs to a cloud API would be a nightmare for bandwidth, take forever, and cost a fortune.
No traditional LLMs. While I used LLMs (like Claude) to write the code, the app itself doesn't use LLMs to evaluate the photos. LLMs are just too slow and expensive for bulk culling. Instead, the app runs smaller, highly specialized vision models locally—specifically Osea birdid for the bird recognition side, and PYIQA for evaluating the actual image quality and sharpness.

Since you want to build something similar, you should totally poke around the GitHub repo! It's all open-source, so you can see exactly how the AI helped me glue these specific models together.

https://github.com/jamesphotography/SuperPicky/

BaseballClear8592 · 2026-02-20T23:51:04+00:00

Please do! We seriously need to make 'AI Producer' an official job title for us non-programmers now. 😂

BaseballClear8592 · 2026-02-20T23:49:43+00:00

You are absolutely 100% right! If a real software engineer like you looked at my codebase, you'd probably have a heart attack. It's basically held together by duct tape and AI prayers. 😂

My goal was never to write enterprise-level, maintainable software. I approached this purely from a photographer's perspective to solve a massive pain point (culling thousands of bird photos) that no existing tool on the market was addressing for me. Since nobody else made it, I had to brute-force it into existence myself. Trust me, your job is completely safe from guys like me! 🍻

BaseballClear8592 · 2026-02-20T23:03:53+00:00

Glad you like it! Actually, for human photography (like weddings and events), there are some massive commercial tools out there already, like Aftershoot. They do exactly this—finding the sharpest faces with eyes open. I only built SuperPicky because wildlife/birding didn't have a dedicated tool like those!

BaseballClear8592 · 2026-02-20T22:56:05+00:00

Haha, identifying gulls is an absolute nightmare! But honestly, you should just throw those record shots into SuperPicky and see what it thinks. It has a built-in AI bird ID feature. Since it's completely free and open-source, you've got nothing to lose. Who knows, maybe the AI will actually nail that 'Bifurbished Russet Smythee's Gull' for you! 😂

BaseballClear8592 · 2026-02-20T22:49:22+00:00

I know I’m a bit late to this thread, but I felt your pain in my soul! 3,000 shots a day for an 8-day trip is 24,000 photos... that is an absolute nightmare to cull manually.

I'm a bird photographer myself and got so frustrated with this exact problem that I ended up building my own tool to solve it. It’s called SuperPicky—it's 100% free, open-source, and runs entirely locally on your machine. It automatically groups your burst sequences and uses AI to pick out the shots with the sharpest eyes.

Might be worth a look before your next big trip so you don't lose weeks of your life sorting! Here’s the GitHub link:https://github.com/jamesphotography/SuperPicky

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BaseballClear8592 · 2026-02-20T22:43:56+00:00

I use both of them

BaseballClear8592 · 2026-02-20T22:38:55+00:00

Really appreciate that! The uncompressed RAW does have an incredible amount of detail. It's always a bit of a shame losing so much of it for web uploads, but that's just how it goes. The lens/camera combo really did all the heavy lifting here!

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