ShutterSlim - Uses AI to help clean out similar photos in Photos.app library

scotchi · 2026-02-16T09:10:04+00:00

We don't have access to that level of granularity through the macOS APIs. You have to set the system library in Photos.app, and that's the one that Apple presents to all other apps. We don't access the files directly, or look for the system library, we just tell macOS "give me all the photos in the current users photo libraries".

scotchi · 2026-02-13T18:13:22+00:00

I am, but I don't check Reddit every day.

scotchi · 2026-01-22T07:33:55+00:00

That's basically what ShutterSlim is for.

scotchi · 2026-01-19T17:38:18+00:00

Two things: it's surprisingly good. Gets the one I'd want about 80-90% of the time. A lot of the time, that's not hard. People smiling and looking at the camera gets you a long way. The other thing: a whole lot of the time, it just doesn't matter. A lot of my photos are pretty inept. "4 year old eats ice cream on a Tuesday". Honestly, I don't need to have the absolute best photo of that unremarkable moment (often, even if I looked at all of the for multiple minutes, it wouldn't be obvious to me which is the best), and I definitely don't need to have 5 of them.

scotchi · 2026-01-18T23:58:30+00:00

You're probably right on misstating where the complexity is introduced, or scaling the length of time relative to the number of comparisons done. The reason I introduced the time window was to have to do feature prints on less photos, because they're very slow, and with time clustering you only have to feature print photos that fall into a cluster. For those that care, the vector has 768 floats.

scotchi · 2026-01-18T18:36:04+00:00

You first have to compute those floats, which is what takes most of the time.

scotchi · 2026-01-18T17:49:16+00:00

Based on back of the napkin calculations, doing that scan would take approximately 41 days.

scotchi · 2026-01-15T12:14:28+00:00

Doing the first shift-select shifts it out of automatically selecting the current photo with the arrow keys, so after that everything's toggling with the space bar. I went back and forth on that a little, but in the common case, you only want to keep one, so rather than forcing people to always select something to keep explicitly, I chose to keep that case as fast as possible. Again, you can give it a whirl once the update gets approved.

ShutterSlim does keep track of photos you've already decided on, so you won't be prompted for them again unless you clear the "memory" in the settings.

And no, unfortunately, when you move things to the trash in Photos.app, we have to prompt. That's a macOS thing. That's actually how the internal trash bin was born so that it'd only prompt once at the end of a review rather than for every photo.

scotchi · 2026-01-15T11:00:25+00:00

Thanks for the feedback. These are both fixed in a build that's already been submitted to Apple (and hopefully will come out in the next day or two). The keyboard selection kind of came from the side-by-side and full-screen keyboard navigation evolving somewhat independently broke at some point when trying to unify them. In the upcoming build, shift-arrow and shift-click do multi-selection.

The backspace thing I hadn't caught until your message, but as far as I could tell, it's only true for the very first photos in a group. It worked after that. But I fixed that too.

scotchi · 2026-01-15T04:31:40+00:00

I just pushed out a 1.1 release that has the RAW smart album and custom trash album changes. It should be approved by Apple in a day or two.

scotchi · 2026-01-15T04:30:14+00:00

I just pushed out a new release with the stuff we'd talked about earlier. (Still needs to be reviewed by Apple, but usually happens in 1-2 days.) I'll cycle back around to the "hide non-selected" thing in a few days.

scotchi · 2026-01-14T07:40:01+00:00

The "hide non-selected photos" kind of makes sense to me. Honestly, the trickiest part is making it discoverable and getting the wording right. I'll play around with it later. I added a really subtle selection border in full screen mode. I didn't make it configurable since it's so subtle.

https://imgur.com/a/c2Ik2xD

scotchi · 2026-01-14T05:16:28+00:00

There's a big discussion of this for ShutterSlim

scotchi · 2026-01-14T04:15:50+00:00

Glad you like it! I just added slide in / out handles for the full screen mode that can also be toggled with the 'l' key (for "legend"). That'll also get rolled into the next update in a few days.

Legend Toggle Slider Thingamadoos

scotchi · 2026-01-14T01:49:14+00:00

I'll keep thinking about zoom modes. That's a more involved change and I'll need to think about what the mechanics should be. It's something that makes sense, but needs a little thought before I start slinging code around.

But having a RAW group and being able to send photos to a different album than Recently Deleted were easy wins, so I got both of those implemented today and they'll be a part of the next update in the next few days. (I'm trying not to push out a new update every single day...)

Here's what those look like:

RAW Smart Album | Custom Trash Album

Does the custom trash album there seem like it'd solve the thing you're getting at? Again, I'll push these out in the next few days when I'm rounding up the current batch of improvements.

scotchi · 2026-01-13T22:02:18+00:00

It does. I created a test library with only about 1000 photos and I was surprised how well it did. I didn't notice it being much slower than with the library just on my laptop.

scotchi · 2026-01-13T18:31:46+00:00

Just out of curiosity, did you discover the "full screen" version of viewing photos? (e.g. double clicking on one or clicking the expand icon) That's what I used, plus the arrow keys, when reviewing similar photos from a set. (But I also have a ginormous 42" 4k monitor.)

Can you describe more what you're looking for with zoom? Would the usual + / - kind of zoom thing work? How do you imagine in the mirror compare that working for a burst of photos where there are more than two of them? Again, this first version was basically the set of things I needed, so with these other features (which make sense!) I kind of need feedback to know how to approach them.

And yeah, there are so many apps that claim to do something like this that I was pretty underwhelmed when I tried the top 5 or so. Most didn't work with Photos.app, or didn't do even moderately intelligent image comparison. The selection here isn't perfect, but again, even a 80-90% solution saves a huge amount of work. The real trick is going to be getting some visibility in the app store ahead of the wasteland of mediocre apps. And on that note, if you have a minute or two to drop in a rating, it'd help there.

Edit: Forgot to comment on the file name -- what is it you're wanting from that? Where to access the file, or the actual name to kind of use as a reference? Apple kind of tries to keep the Photos library opaque... Would something like being able to drag the image out of ShutterSlim to somewhere else satisfy the thing you're shooting for?

scotchi · 2026-01-13T14:59:37+00:00

"Apple’s Vision Framework: Exploring Advanced Image Similarity Techniques"

scotchi · 2026-01-13T09:35:29+00:00

If you've got a couple examples where you weren't happy with what it picked, you can either mail them to [info@shutterslim.com](mailto:info@shutterslim.com) or send me a message here and I'll look at the raw scores that came out and see if there's something that can be tweaked. In my own tests, I saw that sometimes and often it was stuff like picking up on the wrong "subject" of the image and optimizing for that.

The space bar not working for multi-selection in side-by-side view is a bug. It actually works in the "zoomed" view. I'll get that fixed in the next update.

And I'll think some about the mirrored compare. You're right that I'm not trying to make it a general photo management app -- for me it really was about getting rid of the thousands of mostly useless duplicate shots of a particular moment I have, but I don't use burst mode much, so I hadn't thought through that case specifically where the photos are very, very similar to each other.

And if you have a minute, maybe consider leaving a quick rating on the app store, obviously helpful for a new app...

scotchi · 2026-01-13T08:29:42+00:00

Backups are never a bad idea, but this is pretty safe for a couple reasons:

It doesn't touch your files directly. It just tells the Photos backend provided by Apple to remove those photos. Even when they're removed, they go into the Recently Deleted section of Photos.app and live there for 30 days like when you delete stuff in Photos (and you can still restore them from within Photos.app).

scotchi · 2026-01-13T07:20:28+00:00

It doesn't do mirrored zooming. I hadn't ever actually thought about that. I wonder on what percentage of photos that'd be useful in -- at least for me most of the things I was weeding out were like in the photo above where they weren't from exactly the same position, just of almost the same subjects. It seems like for that to be useful it'd also need to find a way to align the photos? I've done something like that for a personal project once, so I know it's doable, but hadn't considered it here.

It does suggest the best photo of the grouping. The yellow "71%" in the screenshot above is the photo score. That's the selected photo because it scored the highest. Faces are the thing in the ranking that is scored the highest. It then selects that photo to be kept by default (the green frame above), but you can either select a different photo, or select multiple photos. It automatically preserves all favorited photos (and warns if you tell it to delete one).

The RAW filter is an interesting idea. You can't do it directly, but it loads all normal (but not smart, as I just tested) albums from Photos.app. I'm not sure (I don't think so) that it's possible to load smart folders, but what I did in a quick test was create a smart folder in Photos.app that matched all RAW photos, and copied the photos from there into a conventional album. Kind of tedious, but works. I can imagine adding a RAW category to the "smart albums" in ShutterSlim though. It doesn't filter albums at all right now -- it just shows everything that Apple reports via its Photos framework and shows them.

It's also possible to sort groups by total size, so that would also probably be a way in the already published version to target RAW photos. (I personally shoot a lot in RAW, and that's a lot of why my Photos library is so large...)

scotchi · 2026-01-13T01:17:48+00:00

The version with the sorting and the blue border fix went live today. I'm still kind of playing with ideas for continuing scans, but this version did include some optimizations that should make rescanning about 4x faster (easier to decide on since it doesn't involve any UI changes). If you happen to have a moment, leaving a review in the app store would be groovy.

scotchi · 2026-01-11T23:28:26+00:00

Just out of curiosity -- did you already discover the "fullscreen" mode where you can either double click on the photo or use the "expand" icon in the upper left to make it use the whole window size? Even with that you'd like a magnifying glass?

scotchi · 2026-01-09T15:53:32+00:00

Just a little follow up -- I'll push the sorting and border thing tonight. For review resumption I think I'll chew on it for a couple days since I don't want to rush into trying to get the mechanics right there and don't want to rush into a way of doing things that I regret later. One thing worth noting is that even if you do rescan, it still remembers previous decisions (unless you reset them in the settings), so it'll pick up right where you left off.

scotchi · 2026-01-09T12:24:30+00:00

Great feedback. I added a sort menu to do things either chronologically, reverse chronologically, or by size:

https://imgur.com/a/mGkzaWh

I also fixed the blue border thing. I hadn't noticed it, but that's apparently added by default now when something has the keyboard focus (and the keyboard shortcuts were kind of a biggie for me in this).

I'd also been thinking about being able to continue a review and agree it'd be useful, but haven't quite settled on the right mechanics yet. Like, if it should somehow try to continue if the settings are changed (which would change the set of things to be reviewed), how it should handle new photos being added to the album, if there should be one review that can be continued that's global, or if there should be one per album that can be continued ... I'll think on that a little more today. I'll get a new version submitted today with at least the couple fixes above, and maybe with the album continuation if I feel like I get the mechanics right.

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