Help · Best Shots
Best Shots has two ways in. AI Culling groups the near-identical frames of a shoot and picks the best of each; Review walks every photo one key press at a time. This page explains both, and where the stars and labels you give end up.
Nothing, until you choose. Scanning, scoring and reviewing only read. The three ways to act are all reversible: Rate Picks writes ratings and moves nothing, Move to Folder… moves the photos you did not keep into a folder you pick, and Move to Trash sends them to the Trash (Recycle Bin on Windows). Restore the last batch undoes a move or a trash; written ratings have their own Undo.
Ratings touch only the rating and label fields. Captions, keywords and dates are left exactly as they were.
The switch at the top picks the mode: AI Culling for groups of near-identical shots, Review for every photo in the folder. Both work on the same folder, and a review can start at once while the AI is still grouping in the background.
Folder to scan · Include subfoldersElite
The shoot to cull, and whether to go into its sub-folders. Start reads the folder; Rescan reads it again and picks up photos added since; Choose folder… moves on to another one.
Bursts · Moments
What counts as one group. Bursts are shots taken within 3 seconds of each other — a burst of a goal, a jump, a first kiss. Moments are the same scene shot again within 2 minutes — a group photo retaken until everyone looked right.
Grouping needs the EXIF capture time, so photos without one are left out of the groups (they can still be reviewed one by one). A RAW and its own JPEG count as one photograph, and an exposure bracket is kept whole, marked Bracket · keeping all, because its frames are meant to be merged, not chosen between.
FINE-TUNE
Each frame is scored on Sharpness, Face quality, Eyes open, Eyes in focus and Exposure; the sliders set how much each one counts. Your taste learns from the frames you keep over the automatic pick, on your own computer, and Forget starts it afresh. Suggestions update live, and any keep you set by hand stays.
WHO MATTERS
Pick one or more people and the frame where they look best wins, even if a stranger blinked. Strangers no longer get a vote in frames these people are in. The list is the people you have named in People.
The groups: KEEP · REMOVE · Best shot
Each group shows its frames with the pick marked Best shot. Click a frame to switch it between KEEP and REMOVE; Keep only best and Keep all decide a whole group at once. The enlarge button opens a frame large beside the rest of its group to compare. Best only shows one tile per group — the one FolioSort picked — instead of every frame. SPACE TO FREE adds up what is marked REMOVE.
Rate Picks
The recommended way to finish. Five stars on every best shot and rejected on the frames it beat, written where Lightroom, Bridge and Capture One read them. Nothing is moved or deleted, and your cataloguer does the rest.
Move to Folder… · Move to Trash
Move to Folder… moves the frames you did not keep into a folder you choose. Move to Trash asks first, and sends them to the Trash rather than deleting them. Either can be undone with Restore the last batch.
Every photo in the folder, burst or not, one key press each — with no wait for anything to be analysed. Nothing is moved, rated or deleted until you choose it.
Keyboard
K T space — keep · X R — reject ·
U — unmark1–5 — stars (the same number again clears them)6–9 — colour label: red, yellow, green, blue; P — purple← → — previous / next photo · esc — back out one layerG — the whole folder as a grid · F — just the photo, full screen ·
I — camera settings and histogram · Z — fit → 50 % → 100 % → 200 %⌘-click adds a photo to the selection, ⇧-click selects a run,
⌘A selects everything shown (Ctrl on Windows).Next photo after marking
On, a whole folder is one key press per photo. Off, you stay on the photo you just marked — useful when you give stars and a colour to the same photo.
Filters · Sort by
Narrow the review by Rating, Colour, Dates or File types, and show Oldest first or Newest first. The counter reads All · Kept · Rejected · Left, so you always know what is still undecided.
“You shot … groups of near-identical photos”
If the AI finishes grouping while you are reviewing, it offers its picks instead of applying them. Mark the other … marks every near-duplicate except the best one as rejected, leaving any photo you already decided on alone. Dismiss it and the green badge still shows which frame it picked; Show it jumps to that frame.
Write stars & colours…
Saves your stars, rejections and colour labels where Lightroom, Bridge and Capture One read them — the
standard XMP Rating and Label fields. Camera RAW files (CR3, NEF, ARW and the
rest) get a .xmp sidecar next to them; DNG, JPEG, HEIC, TIFF and PNG are written inside the
file, because Lightroom ignores sidecars for those. You confirm the list first; files that cannot be
written safely are listed with the reason rather than skipped silently. Ratings written comes with
an Undo.
Which plan
Best Shots is Elite, like the other features that run on-device AI. On the free plan and on Pro the screen stays visible so you can see what it does, and the license is asked for when you start.
FAQ
No. Nothing is moved, rated or deleted until you choose it. The safest route, Rate Picks, moves nothing at all: it writes five stars on each best shot and a rejected flag on the frames it beat, where Lightroom, Bridge and Capture One read them. If you do move or trash photos, they go to a folder you choose or to the Trash, and the last batch can be restored.
It scores every frame on sharpness, face quality, whether eyes are open, whether the eyes are in focus and exposure, and it learns from the frames you keep. You can weight each of those with the sliders under Fine-tune, and under Who matters pick the people whose best look decides the frame, so a stranger blinking in the background no longer costs a good photo.
Into the standard XMP Rating and Label fields. For camera RAW files such as CR3, NEF or ARW they go into a .xmp sidecar next to the photo, because nothing should write into a camera RAW; for DNG, JPEG, HEIC, TIFF and PNG they go inside the file, because that is where Lightroom looks. Nothing else in the photo's metadata is touched, and a write can be undone.
Elite. Best Shots is one of the on-device AI features, alongside AI Search, Find a Person, Smart Folders, Workflows and Watch Folders.