In short: culling is deciding which photos from a big shoot earn a place in the final album, and which ones sit unused. In Confetti, you cull by grouping photos by person and moment first, then building the album from what's left, not by scrolling a folder in order.
What does "culling" actually mean?
Culling is the sorting pass every big shoot needs before it becomes an album: separating the photos worth keeping from the near-duplicates, the technical misses, and the frames that just don't add anything. A wedding shoot commonly delivers 400 to 800 photos from the photographer alone; once guest phones get folded in, the pile often passes 2,000 or 3,000. Somewhere in that pile is the actual album, usually a fraction of the total.
Why does culling get hard once the shoot is this big?
Scrolling a folder in shooting order sounds simple until you're 900 photos in and every "keep" or "skip" decision starts to blur together. Decision fatigue sets in fast, and it's exactly when fatigue hits that a genuinely great candid gets skipped because it was buried between twenty near-identical shots of the same toast.
How does Confetti help you cull?
Confetti's face tagging groups photos by person first, so instead of comparing a photo to whatever came before it chronologically, you compare it to every other photo of the same person or moment. See how face tagging works for how that grouping happens. Once photos are grouped, you build the album with the Standard builder, hand-picking exactly what goes in, or the Intelligent builder, which arranges a curated pass automatically. See Standard vs. Intelligent albums for how the two compare. For the actual pass-by-pass method, see how to cull 3,000 wedding photos without losing a weekend.
Where do the photos live while I'm culling?
In your own Google Drive, the whole time. Confetti reads the folder you connect with read-only access; it never moves, deletes, or modifies anything in your Drive. Culling in Confetti only affects what goes into an album definition, not the photo library itself. See how Confetti keeps your photos private for the full custody answer.
What culling in Confetti does NOT do
- It does not delete or move anything in your Drive. Your originals are untouched no matter how many photos you leave out of an album.
- It does not decide the final cut for you. The Standard builder needs you to choose what goes in; the Intelligent builder generates a draft you still refine and confirm before anything is final.
- It is not an automatic "reject pile." Nothing gets removed from your library just because it's left out of an album.
Frequently asked questions
Does culling in Confetti delete photos from my Drive? No. Culling only changes what's included in an album you're building. Every original photo stays in your Drive whether or not it makes the album.
Do I have to cull before I build an album? Not strictly, but it helps to treat culling as the first draft of the album itself, not a separate chore before the "real" work starts. The photos you group and shortlist are largely the photos that end up in the finished album.
Does culling work for smaller shoots too, not just weddings? Yes. The same grouping-by-person approach works for a trip, reunion, or any event where the photo count outgrew a simple scroll.
Related
- How to cull 3,000 wedding photos without losing a weekend
- Choosing the keepers from 3,000 wedding photos
- What is AI face tagging?
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