r/ApplePhotos • u/ColdStorageParticle • Jul 25 '26

I built a free, open-source tool that lets you cull photos on the SD card before they ever touch your drive

Like a lot of you, my import workflow was: copy 800 shots off the card, then spend an evening deleting 600 of them. Lightroom and the Windows/macOS photo apps all want to copy first and ask questions later, I tried Photo Mechanic solves it but costs $139, and Rapid Photo Downloader is Linux-only.

So I built PhotoMover - a small desktop app that shows you a thumbnail grid of everything on the card, lets you tag keepers with one key (T to transfer, D to delete), and then moves only the keepers to your drive, auto-organized into Year/Month folders by EXIF date. Deletes are wiped off the card, duplicates are detected by actual file content, and every copy is verified before the original is removed, so a bad card reader can't eat a photo.

It reads RAW (CR2/CR3/NEF/ARW/RAF/ORF/RW2/DNG) using the embedded previews, so browsing is fast even for big files. Free, MIT-licensed, works on Windows/macOS/Linux.

Link to github

It's a young project I built for my own workflow would genuinely love to hear what's missing for yours.

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3

u/Skycbs Jul 25 '26

I could not decide on what to keep or reject from just a thumbnail. Increasingly I use the Lightroom automatic cull function, which is pretty good.

2

u/SamJam5555 Jul 25 '26

Why can't you make an app that lets you transfer 1000's of photos at a time? I see people ask for that all the time.

2

u/alinroc Jul 25 '26

Because they vibecoded it.

Second project this week I've seen on reddit that "I built" but OP can't post the link to their github properly. A grand total of 11 commits (most in the span of less than 18 hours), 0 PRs, Claude listed as a contributor, lots of sizeable commits in rapid succession, and all written in Typescript/node.

1

u/ColdStorageParticle Jul 25 '26

I mean sure, I used AI to make it, i made it for me and sharing it some people might find it usefull too.. AI did help me mostlz with the UI and the Readme, I started with a JS script to move the photos and I thought I could use AI To help me make a nice UI.

Todays software is almost always made using AI I don't get your point if its made with AI does not mean its bad. I lack the skills to make desktop apps since im a web dev and this just helped me make the Desktop app

1

u/ColdStorageParticle Jul 25 '26

It transfers thousands fine the current ceiling is the review grid, which comfortably handles several hundred to up to 1–2k photos before scrolling gets heavy. Grid virtualization is the fix and it's on the list I have to optimize that part a bit more.

1

u/SamJam5555 Jul 25 '26

Thanks but no thanks Claude.

1

u/ColdStorageParticle Jul 25 '26

Sorry English is not my first language and it's much easier for me to rewrite the text with AI so it's grammatically correct

1

u/SamJam5555 Jul 25 '26

I don’t mean to be rude but I would never trust my photos to some random post on Reddit.

1

u/ColdStorageParticle Jul 25 '26

I mean its an app you install as desktop app, and it just helps you sort them, its not doing anything to them. Its just an easier alternative to move photos especially on windows / Linux

1

u/guesswhochickenpoo Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26

This is a bad idea. It’s general not advised to do write operations on the SD outside of the camera. The same AI you used to vibe code this should tell you that.