I’ll be upfront: I was skeptical. I’d heard photographers talking about AI culling tools for a while and kind of assumed it was one of those things that sounds good in theory but adds more steps than it removes. 

I’ve been using Aftershoot for almost two years now, and it’s one of the few tools I’d genuinely miss if it disappeared.

Here’s my actual experience with it, including where it shines and where it has limits. If you’re here for the discount code, here you go: Get 10% off Aftershoot through my affiliate link. 

Why I Needed an AI Culling Tool

I shoot a lot. For family sessions especially, my whole approach is to keep things moving and candid: kids running, parents laughing, nobody standing stiff in a lineup. That means I’m shooting through moments rather than setting up individual frames, and I’d rather have too many photos than miss the one where the four-year-old does something completely unpredictable.

Same logic applies to weddings. I’m not going to miss the flower girl’s face or the moment grandma tears up at the end of the aisle because I was being conservative with my shutter.

That means that I typically shoot 500 or more photos in a 1 to 2 hour session. And I don’t deliver that many (about 10%) because I believe in giving clients the very best images rather than a massive folder they have to dig through themselves. So the gap between what I shoot and what I deliver is big, and the culling was eating serious time.

Before Aftershoot, culling a session took me about an hour or more depending on how many hours I was shooting. That’s almost as long as the session itself, which felt wrong. Now it takes around 30 minutes. Not revolutionary on the surface, but across a full shooting season, that’s a meaningful chunk of hours back.

How I Actually Use Aftershoot

My workflow is pretty consistent. I import all the photos from a session, select AI-assisted culling, choose the shoot type, and then turn on a few specific settings that matter for the way I work.

The first is the duplicate detection. This is the setting that makes the biggest difference for how I shoot. Instead of reviewing every individual frame, Aftershoot groups similar images into sets based on movement and composition. I use the large group setting, which means photos where someone shifts their arm slightly stay in the same group rather than creating a separate cluster. For sessions where I’m shooting through movement, that matters a lot, otherwise I’d have dozens of tiny groups to click through instead of a manageable number of larger ones.

I also turn on blurry photo detection and closed eyes detection. The closed eyes one isn’t perfect when subjects are far away or looking down intentionally, but it does save me from zooming in manually on every frame to check. The color coding system is what makes this practical; blurry photos and closed-eye shots are flagged visually, so I can see at a glance before I’ve made any decisions.

Once the cull runs (I usually make a coffee while it processes), I go through the highlighted photos in each group, pick my selections, and export to Lightroom. The whole thing is clean and doesn’t require me to change anything else about my editing workflow.

What Aftershoot Doesn’t Do (For Me)

Aftershoot does have an editing feature, and there’s a marketplace with different AI editing styles. But I haven’t used it and so I can’t give my opinion on this part, although judging by all of the different presets that are in there, I think it could be very useful for a lot of photographers.

My presets are highly specific to the Paris light conditions I’m working in (morning light in the Marais shoots differently from golden hour near the Seine in November, and rainy days in Paris have their own quality entirely). I edit quite a bit even with my own presets, so I wasn’t ready to hand that over to an AI profile.

That’s not a criticism though. Plenty of photographers swear by the editing side of the tool, especially those with more consistent lighting conditions. It’s just not where I get value from it personally.

Aftershoot Pricing

Aftershoot has four plans, all with unlimited images. The one that matches how I use it is the Selects plan, which covers AI culling only.

Selects costs $10 per month on a yearly subscription ($120/year) or $15 per month if you pay monthly. It includes unlimited AI culling and duplicate detection.

If you want to add AI editing, the Essentials plan is $20 per month on a yearly subscription ($240/year) and includes unlimited culling plus access to 35+ pre-built AI editing styles from the Aftershoot Marketplace.

For most photographers starting out with AI culling, Selects is the logical entry point. You can always upgrade if you want to experiment with the editing side.

There is a 30-day free trial, so you can test it properly on a few real sessions before committing.

Is Aftershoot Worth It?

For the way I work, yes. The time savings are real and they compound across a season. But more than the raw minutes, it’s the mental load that has shifted. I’m not getting lost in a sea of similar frames trying to make micro-decisions. Aftershoot does the heavy lifting on the obvious cuts (blurry, duplicates, eyes closed) and leaves me to make the actual creative choices.

If you shoot a high volume and deliver a curated selection, this kind of tool pays for itself quickly. If you shoot 150 photos per session and already find culling easy, the math is different.

The editing feature is worth trying if your workflow is more standardised than mine. The marketplace has real options and the AI learns from your existing Lightroom edits, which is a smarter approach than applying a static preset.

Aftershoot Discount Code

Use my discount code to get 10% of Aftershoot. 

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