Getting started
Projects and your files
What a project is, what Cullant writes beside your photos, and how to undo all of it.
A project is a folder
There is no library, no catalogue and no import. A project is a folder on a disk, a card or a phone, and Cullant reads it where it is. Subfolders are part of the same project, and the folder tree on the left of the grid lets you narrow to one of them.
Open the same folder again later and everything you did is still there.
What Cullant writes
Exactly two things, and both are optional in the sense that you can throw them away.
The database
<your folder>/.cullant/cullant.db holds every rating, flag, colour label, task tag, group and
queued action. It is the source of truth: your photo files carry none of this until you ask them
to.
Because it lives inside the project folder, it travels with the shoot. Copy the folder to
another machine and your work goes with it. Delete the .cullant folder and you are back to a
plain folder of photos, with nothing lost but your decisions.
The thumbnail cache
Thumbnails and loupe previews are cached so the second pass through a shoot is instant. You can throw the cache away at any time from the settings and Cullant will build it again.
Sidecars, if you ask
On commit, Cullant can write XMP sidecar files carrying the rating, flag, colour label and orientation. Lightroom Classic and Capture One both read them. This is off by default in the sense that nothing is written until you commit, and you can turn it off entirely. See XMP and Lightroom.
What Cullant never does
- It does not move or rename a file unless you queue a move.
- It does not change the pixels of a photo. Ever. Rotation is a flag, not a re-encode.
- It does not send anything anywhere. There is no network code in the app.
Rescanning
Add files to the folder while a project is open and Cullant will not see them until it looks again. You can rescan by hand at any time, or set an automatic rescan of every 1, 5 or 15 minutes in the settings. Automatic rescanning pauses while the storage is unreachable, so a card you unplugged does not produce a list of phantom deletions.
Removable and network storage
Cullant remembers where each recent project lives and checks whether that storage is reachable before it tries to open it. A card that is not in the reader shows as unavailable instead of failing halfway through a scan.
On Android the folder is picked through the system file picker, and Cullant only ever sees the folder you handed it.