look · cull · loop
Eighty thousand photos, and the good ones are buried. Loupe is a self-hosted workbench for going through them — frame by frame, month by month — and deciding what to keep. Nothing is deleted by accident. Your photos never leave your machine.
Personal photo culling
Eighty thousand photos pile up fast. Loupe lets you look at each one and keep only what matters — nothing deleted by accident.
look · cull · loop
the problem
Phones shoot in bursts. Cloud sync hoards. So the screenshots, the eleven near-identical sunsets, the accidental pocket shots — they all survive forever, right next to the photographs you actually love. Loupe is the opposite of a backup: a quiet, deliberate place to look closely and choose well.
overview
The home view lays the entire library out by year and month. Each month is a little photobook spread — two facing pages, hinged at the spine — so you can scan a decade at a glance and feel where the stories are.
The progress band across the top is always honest: how many frames are reviewed, how many cut and kept, what's left, and how much disk you'd reclaim by acting on the cuts.
A library you can hold in your hand, not a folder you dread opening.
discovery
Across the top of the overview, a 35 mm film strip drifts by — a slow, looping reel of random frames pulled from across the years, sprocket holes and all. Portrait shots sit pillarboxed on the film base, exactly as they would on real stock.
It's not a task list. It's an invitation: hover to pause, and any frame that catches your eye drops you straight into it. Pause, look, fall back in.
the month photobook
Tap a month and it opens as a real spread — a hero frame or a mosaic, with a single right-hand page that turns left over the gutter. The selection is diversity-deduped: no two near-identical frames sit side by side, and it re-shuffles fresh on every visit, so the same month never looks the same twice.
Behind the scenes it's a perceptual-hash and timestamp guard picking the most distinct, in-focus frames from the pool — burst duplicates quietly stay out of the spread.
The best of a month, never the same six photos twice.


the week contact sheet
Drop into a month and its weeks lay out the way you'd lay strips on a light table — each day a single frame on a film-base sheet, sprockets top and bottom. The label rides the rebate beneath the frame, never across the picture, so nothing covers the photograph you're judging.
One frame per sheet is lit amber — the safelight. It's the day to start with: the one you've already half-culled, or the busiest if you haven't begun. A notch under each frame tracks how far you've gotten. Tap any frame and you're inside that day.
A week at a glance — one frame lit to tell you where to begin.






focus mode
Open a frame and the photo fills the room — brightest thing on the screen — with a quiet signal panel beside it. EXIF and capture details up top; then library-relative scores with percentile bars: an Apple aesthetic score, a sharpness read from a blur measurement, so you can tell a keeper from a near-miss at a glance.
Below that, content labels and the people in frame. Screenshots and documents are called out with their own tell. People who matter — family, the dogs — carry an amber ring, a standing reminder not to cull them by reflex.

culling & review
Three keys, that's the whole loop. Every decision is recorded, never enacted: a cut is just a mark. The stats bar's cut and kept counts are live links into full review grids, where keepers wear a green edge and cuts a dimmed red one.
Scan a whole decision at once, spot the one you got wrong, and flip it back. Protected frames are guarded — Loupe won't let a reflex cut take out someone who matters.
Reversible by design. The undo is the feature.
auto-flagged candidates
Loupe pre-sorts the obvious clutter into Candidates: screenshots, documents and receipts, and the genuinely blurry frames. They're suggestions, never automatic — a fast lane for the decisions that don't need much thought, so the real culling gets your full attention.
Those judgments lean on Apple's enrichment already baked into the library — aesthetic scores, scene labels, and recognized people — surfaced in the signal panel rather than hidden in a database.
and three more ways through
The same library, entered from a different door — because how you remember a photo is rarely by its date.
Marfa · 64
Big Bend · 22
Taos · 18
Santa Fe · 31
Lisbon · 612A map of everywhere you've shot, clustered into postcards on a charcoal bench. Roughly three in five frames carry GPS, and Loupe turns those into a browsable atlas — and into place-burst candidates worth a second look.





Loupe stitches your travel into journeys — around a hundred of them — each a travel-wrapped contact sheet you sweep with a loupe. Cull a whole trip in one sitting, the way you'd lay prints out on a table.
A third axis beyond keep and cut: a private shelf. Anything you vault is hidden everywhere — overview, trips, places — and held out of any export or delete. Some frames aren't for culling. They're just yours.
the ethos
Culling should feel calm, not dangerous. Loupe is built on one promise: nothing leaves without your say-so, and anything can be taken back. Decisions are marks on a sheet — you do the deleting, later, deliberately, when you're sure.
A cut is a decision, not an action. The originals sit untouched until you choose to act, and every call is one tap from reversed. Live Photo motion files quietly follow their stills, so a pair is never half-culled.
Family and the dogs carry a standing guard. Loupe refuses to cull protected frames on reflex and rings them everywhere they appear, so the photos you'd most regret losing are the ones it's hardest to lose.
No dark patterns, no streaks, no nagging. Just an honest tally — reviewed, cut, kept, remaining, and the disk you'd reclaim — so you always know exactly where you stand and can stop whenever you like.
self-hosted & private
Loupe is one small program you run at home, pointed at your own library. No accounts, no uploads, no third party in the middle of your memories. The library is read-only to Loupe; only your decisions are ever written down.
Your photographs are never uploaded, indexed by anyone else, or shown to a model in the cloud. The app sits behind your own access; the originals never move.
Loupe reads your photos and metadata and writes only to its own decisions file. Your originals, your folder structure, and your backups stay exactly as they were.
Loupe was built for one person's library and offered to anyone who wants the same calm way through theirs. Self-host it; it's yours to run.