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How Cullit uses AI

Last updated August 11, 2026

Cullit uses AI to help you get through a shoot faster. It looks at your photos and tells you things that are tedious to check by hand across two thousand frames — whether a face is in focus, whether eyes are open, whether someone is smiling.

That's the whole job. It doesn't pick your photos. You do.

What the AI looks for

  • Faces — where they are in the frame. Position only.
  • Focus — whether each face is sharp, slightly soft, or out of focus.
  • Eyes — whether they are open, partly closed, or closed.
  • Smiles — whether a face is smiling or not.

Two smaller things, for completeness. Cullit measures which way a head is turned, so the eye check stays reliable on tilted faces. And it groups your photos into scenes from the time each frame was taken — that one is arithmetic on timestamps, not AI.

What the AI never does

  • It doesn't recognise anyone. Cullit detects that a face is present. It never works out whose face it is. No face matching, no grouping people across photos, no name attached to anyone, no face database — not on your machine, not on ours.
  • It doesn't guess anything about people. No age, no gender, no ethnicity, no health, no mood. “Smiling” means the mouth is smiling in that frame. It is a description of the picture, not a judgment about the person.
  • It doesn't delete anything. Ever. The AI flags; you decide. Nothing is removed, hidden, or discarded without you doing it.

Where your photos go

Nowhere. They stay on your computer.

Cullit reads your photos from your own drive, analyses them on your own processor, and writes the results to a database on your own machine. No photo, no crop of a photo, no face, and no measurement taken from a face is ever uploaded, transmitted, or stored on our servers. There is no cloud step in the culling process. Disconnect from the internet and culling still works.

This isn't a privacy setting you switch on. It's how the app is built. There is no other mode.

What we do receive

  • Your account details — the email address and subscription status needed to let you sign in and to know that you've paid.
  • Crash reports, if the app breaks. We receive a technical report of what went wrong and where in the code. File paths are stripped out before sending, so we don't learn the names of your folders, projects, or files. These reports contain no images and no face data.

What stays on your machine

Cullit keeps its measurements in a database on your own computer, so it doesn't have to re-analyse a shoot every time you open it. That database holds what the AI found — how sharp each face is, whether eyes are open, whether there's a smile — and the coordinates of a few points on each face: the corners of the eyes, the nose, the corners of the mouth. It sits on your drive, alongside your photos, and it goes nowhere.

What we never receive

  • Your photos, or any part of them
  • Face crops, face measurements, or any per-face score
  • The names of your files, folders, or projects
  • Any record of which photos you kept or rejected

We don't train on your photos

Cullit's AI was trained before it ever reached you, on licensed and openly-licensed image sets. Your photos are not used to train, improve, tune, or evaluate our models — not in aggregate, not anonymised, not with your permission, because we don't ask for it. There is no opt-in, because there is nothing to opt into.

What we will never build

  • Face recognition. We will not identify people, match faces between photos, or build face groups. Not as an opt-in, not as a pro feature.
  • Sending your photos to a server for analysis. The AI runs on your machine. If that ever had to change, it would be a different product, and we would say so here before it shipped — not after.
  • Guessing attributes about people — age, gender, ethnicity, or health.
  • Deleting your photos for you.
  • Training our models on your work.

If we ever cross one of those lines, we will say so on this page, with a date, before the change reaches you — not in a changelog footnote after the fact.

When this page changes

This page is dated. If we change how the AI works in a way that affects anything above, we update this page and note what changed and when. Material changes are announced here and in the release notes before they take effect.

Questions about any of this: support@cullit.app