Syrinx Ventures

PicSift

Other photo cullers hand down one number and keep the reasoning to themselves. PicSift names the models it uses, scores on six dimensions you can see, and tells you why a photo placed where it did.

PicSift on macOS: a grid of photographs sorted best-first, each tile carrying a numeric score and a quality tier.
Plate I The ranked grid. Every tile carries its score and its tier, and the pile is sorted best-first. Nothing in this view left the machine.

No. 01 · The difference

It shows its work

Named models, legible scores.

Six dimensions

Overall appeal, sharpness, lighting, composition, faces and subject are scored separately, and each photo's breakdown is there to read. A single opaque number is the thing this app was built not to be.

Four tiers

Every photo lands in Excellent, Good, Average or Below, so a set of any size resolves into four piles you can act on before you have looked at a single frame.

A Model Library

Each model PicSift uses is named in the app, with its origin, its training data, its licence and links to the research it came from. The work underneath is open, and so is the credit for it.

PicSift's Priorities panel open beside the grid, with a six-axis chart weighting sharpness, composition, appeal, faces, subject and lighting.
Plate II The Priorities panel. The six axes are the scoring dimensions themselves; pull one and the grid re-ranks. Smart Auto sets them for you if you would rather not.
PicSift finishing a scoring pass: a summary card reading 83 photos scored, split across the Excellent, Good, Average and Below tiers.
Plate III The end of a pass. Eighty-three photographs sorted into the four tiers, with the counts stated before you open the set.

No. 02 · In use

Finding and deciding

Describe it, and it is there.

Visual search

Type what you remember — a german shepherd in water, a skyline at dusk — and the library narrows to it. No tags, no setup; it runs on CLIP models on the device.

People

Face clustering gathers the library by person, so the regulars become a way of browsing rather than a thing you have to have labelled first.

Duplicates

Near-identical frames are found and grouped, which is how five versions of one shot become the one worth keeping.

PicSift's search field holding the phrase german shepherd in water, with the library narrowed to fourteen matching photographs.
Plate IV A phrase typed into the search field — german shepherd in water — takes eighty-two photographs down to fourteen, still carrying their scores.
A single photograph filling the PicSift window for review, with a filmstrip of the rest of the set below it and keep and reject controls.
Plate V One frame at full size, the rest of the set on a filmstrip beneath it, and keep or reject a keystroke away.

No. 03 · Where it runs

On your machine

Nothing to sign in to.

The scoring, the searching and the face clustering all happen on the device. There is no account to make. Photos are not uploaded, and neither are their scores or their embeddings. There is no analytics — the only thing PicSift can ever send is a diagnostic report, and you are the one who sends it.

One Universal Purchase covers Mac, iPhone and iPad, and it is shared with your family the way any other app is.

Mac — shipping now · iPad coming Get PicSift — Mac App Store picsift.com

The other thing we publish: KindleFill

Syrinx Ventures

A small company that publishes software.