"The shrike is a songbird that hunts: it selects its catches and keeps them pinned where it can find them again. That is the whole app."
— the About panel, telling the truth
The missing link in your
creative workflow.
A fast, native RAW culler for macOS. Fly through a fresh card the moment it mounts. Rate, tag, and reject as fast as you can press the keys. Organize your photos into sets in the way that makes sense to you. Never loses track of a file, no matter which drive it wanders to.
Apple Silicon · macOS 14+ · Signed & notarized · No account required.
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★★★★★The lifecycle
From the card to the client, Shrike carries the shoot.
Every stage of a job lives in one catalog — except developing the RAWs. That part stays in the editor you already love.
- 01 Shrike
Ingest
Card to disk in one hop, every byte checksum-verified as it lands.
- 02 Shrike
Edit
Rate, reject, and compare at keyboard speed. The selects fall out.
- 03 You
Process
Develop the RAWs in Lightroom, Capture One, Photoshop — your call. Shrike stays out of the darkroom.
- 04 Shrike
Organize
Projects, sessions, sets. Files stay found no matter which drive they wander to.
- 05 Shrike
Publish
Hand off a web gallery straight from your sets. The client sees the finished work.
handled by Shrike · your editor of choice
Three moves and you're working
Select. Organize. Deliver.
Cull at full speed, keep every shoot organized, and hand off finished work. Solo out of the box, and when the whole studio needs in, Shrike Cloud is the way.
Select
Shrike browses the previews your camera already rendered, so a fresh card opens instantly and scrolling never stutters. Rate with 1–5, reject with a keystroke, auto-advance to the next frame. Zoom into the loupe when it matters. Faithful rendering, a histogram, clipping warnings, and a compare view for when two frames are fighting for the same spot.
Organize
Projects hold sessions, sessions hold sets, and sets can mix photos from any folder on any drive. Photos are identified by what they are, not where they sit. When you move files to an archive drive or the studio NAS, the catalog just keeps up. Offline drive? Browse via the cache, and when you're off the plane, all of your changes sync back up.
Deliver
Batch rename with tokens - {seq} {date} {camera} {orig} — shift capture times across a multi-camera shoot, create multiple sets from the same session, and track alternative file names within a delivery. It is everything we've always wanted in a culling and organizational tool.
Under the feathers
Built like a tool, not a service.
Unreasonably fast
First look at a 5,000-photo folder in under a second; scrolling stays butter-smooth at 10,000. The focus is on the photography rather than the software (even though we really love the software).
Keyboard first
Every decision is a keystroke: 1–5 to rate, letters to tag or reject, Z for the loupe, S to add the image to a set, and so on. Don't like our keymap? Set your own.
Ingest you can trust
One hop from card to destination, with every byte checksum-verified as it lands. A file only gets its real name after it proves it arrived intact. Shoot the wedding, and sleep soundly that night.
Local-first, really
Your catalog lives whole on your Mac. Solo mode is the default: no server, no account, no connection required. Airplane mode editing, we call it.
Grows into a studio
When you're ready to share, Shrike Cloud keeps one catalog in sync for the whole team. Everyone works the same shoot without stepping on each other, and you can see who's working where in realtime.
Claude can see your shoot (or not!)
A built-in MCP server lets your AI agent work within your catalog — build sets, tag keywords, crawl your drives, and more. Opt-in, and dormant until you open the door.
"Claude, please add images [list of 200 photos from the Bride] to a new set called "Client Favorites"The numbers
Fast is a feature. So is honest.
<1s
to first look at 5,000 photos
60fps
scrolling at 10,000 assets
0
accounts required to get started
SHA-256
verified on every ingest
Pin your best work
where you can find it.
The beta shipping weekly (at least). Apple Silicon, macOS 14 Sonoma or later. Signed, notarized, and auto-updating.