Flick
An extremely fast photo culler for macOS, written in Rust.
I shoot a lot on a Sigma BF, and the slow part was never taking the photos. It was sitting down afterwards to decide which ones to keep. Flick turns that into a keyboard game. Open a folder or the camera card, then fly through it: ↑ keeps a photo, ↓ marks it for deletion, and each key moves straight to the next one.
When you're done, one screen shows everything you marked, and Enter deletes it for good. The space on the card frees up right away. Flick has no library, no import step, and no editing. It does one job, as fast as the hardware allows.
Free and MIT licensed. Signed and notarized. macOS 13 or later, Apple Silicon and Intel.
Speed
Time to put a 23 MP photo on screen, read cold from the camera over USB. The next photo is usually already decoded, so it appears on the very next frame.
- It reads 8% of each file. Camera JPEGs carry a smaller preview inside them. Flick reads only that preview, then loads full resolution once you stop on a photo.
- It works ahead of you. The next eight photos decode on background threads in the direction you're moving. At 15 photos a second, every photo was on screen the frame after the keypress.
- It never blocks. Disk reads and decoding stay off the UI thread, which only draws, on the GPU.
- It's small. One 12 MB native binary, with no runtime and no Electron.
Keys
- → ←
- Next or previous photo
- ↑
- Keep, then next
- ↓
- Mark for deletion, then next
- ⌫
- Undo
- Z
- Zoom to 100%
- Tab
- Next undecided photo
- Enter
- Review, then delete for good
RAW and JPEG files from the same shot count as one photo. Marks are saved as you go, so quitting halfway loses nothing.