A free, open-source photo and video organiser called Daddy, Cull! is offering people a way to bring years of scattered memories onto a disk they own and clear out the clutter one day at a time. According to the project's website, the tool gathers files from camera cards, iCloud Photos and Google Photos exports into a single local library, then lets users review the photos and videos taken on any given calendar date across every year they cover.
The software runs on macOS 14 or newer with a browser interface, and it can also be installed on servers using Docker. For anyone sitting on a decade of phone snapshots, bursts of near-identical shots and screenshots, the pitch is simple: keep the moments that matter and send everything else to a recovery bin.
What culling means in practice
Culling is the process of deciding which images and clips to keep and which to delete. Photographers have done it for generations, but most people now face the task on a scale that was never practical before. Phones capture thousands of files a year, and cloud services store them without any prompt to sort through them.
Daddy, Cull! approaches the problem by date rather than by an endless scroll. On 30 September, for example, a user would review the photos and videos from 30 September 2016, 2019, 2023 and every other year in the library. Each item can be kept, favourited or removed with a single key press, and the user then marks that date as reviewed.
A calendar that tracks progress
A Year calendar view shows how much material still waits on each date and which dates have already been finished. Each completed day adds to a streak, which the app celebrates with a small card and a burst of confetti. The approach turns a daunting backlog into a series of short sessions, a model the developer describes as small daily reviews rather than one exhausting weekend.
Bringing files together
The first step is importing. Users can copy files from a camera card or a phone export into an Import folder, and new arrivals are filed within about a minute. The software supports iCloud Photos in two ways: downloading originals every six hours with the icloudpd tool, or copying them from the Photos app on a Mac using osxphotos. Google Takeout exports are compared against the existing library, so only missing files are added.
Files are sorted into folders by year, month and day, using the date recorded in their metadata, then their file name, and finally their file date. Related files such as Live Photos, RAW and JPEG pairs and sidecar files are kept together. The developer says nothing is overwritten, and any file the library already holds is set aside for the user to check.
Safeguards for deleted files
- Removed items pass through a Bin with a grace period chosen by the user.
- Each file's SHA-256 fingerprint is checked again before it is moved.
- Undo covers the last hundred decisions, and a Log records every choice.
- Only byte-identical copies are treated as duplicates, and the user picks which copy stays.
Why the local approach matters
The project's case rests on ownership. Cloud services are effective at keeping devices in sync, but relying on a single account means access to a family's photo history can depend on one company's terms and systems. Daddy, Cull! instead stores the library as ordinary folders on a disk the user controls, which can then be backed up to a second drive, a network-attached storage device or a cloud provider of the user's choice.
Compatibility is another selling point. Because the library is plain folders, media servers such as Immich, Jellyfin and Plex, as well as Finder, can read it as an external library. Favourites set in Daddy, Cull! are carried into Immich, and Jellyfin is asked to rescan shortly after files are removed so that deleted videos stop appearing.
Apple Photos and installation
An optional helper called Cull Sync, which runs as a small menu-bar app, can pass removals and favourites to the Photos app. According to the project, a photo removed this way also leaves iCloud, but nothing changes until the user presses Apply, macOS asks for confirmation, and the removed items go to Recently Deleted. The software listens only on the local address and separates the process that changes the library from the web interface that reads it.
The current release is labelled a beta. Mac users are offered an installer that checks their system and opens setup in a browser, and the project also suggests that users can have a coding assistant run the installation. Linux, Unraid, Synology and TrueNAS users can use Docker Compose instead. The developer publishes a versioned API with 86 routes, along with addons that can be switched off or extended.
Recent release notes describe further work on the review workflow, including burst and near-duplicate review, support for iPad use and a feature that compares Apple's own scores and labels for each picture. The project's notes say those signals were only marked in the viewer where they proved useful when checked against files already reviewed.
What comes next
Daddy, Cull! is aimed at people who have accepted that their photo history is spread across several clouds and devices and want one local archive to anchor it. Its success will depend on how well the beta holds up for users with large libraries and whether the promised backups and integrations work reliably outside the developer's own setup. For now, the project offers a practical option for anyone who wants to clear the clutter without giving up control of their memories.
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