I built a free, open-source tool that lets you cull photos on the SD card before they ever touch your drive
Like a lot of you, my import workflow was: copy 800 shots off the card, then spend an evening deleting 600 of them. Lightroom and the Windows/macOS photo apps all want to copy first and ask questions later, I tried Photo Mechanic solves it but costs $139, and…
Like a lot of you, my import workflow was: copy 800 shots off the card, then spend an evening deleting 600 of them. Lightroom and the Windows/macOS photo apps all want to copy first and ask questions later, I tried Photo Mechanic solves it but costs $139, and Rapid Photo Downloader is Linux-only. So I built PhotoMover - a small desktop app that shows you a thumbnail grid of everything on the card, lets you tag keepers with one key (T to transfer, D to delete), and then moves only the keepers to your drive, auto-organized into Year/Month folders by EXIF date. Deletes are wiped off the card, duplicates are detected by actual file content, and every copy is verified before the original is removed, so a bad card reader can't eat a photo. It reads RAW (CR2/CR3/NEF/ARW/RAF/ORF/RW2/DNG) using the embedded previews, so browsing is fast even for big files. Free, MIT-licensed, works on Windows/macOS/Linux. Download + screenshots: https://github.com/alminisl/PhotoMover It's a young project I built for my own workflow would genuinely love to hear what's missing for yours.
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Is it able to view full size photo? Zoom in and move around to inspect pixels. And compare side by side of two photos? How is the speed with reading the SD card? My workflow is to import first into local drive using Lightroom 6. Then I generate previews to review them. This is very fast on SSD, compared to reading SD card.
Good questions Full size: yes, the preview loads the actual full-resolution file (for RAW it uses the embedded JPEG preview). Zoom/pan to inspect pixels: not yet. It's fit-to-screen only right now, so it's fine for composition and obvious misses but not for checking critical focus at 100%. Zoom + pan is top of my list since the full-res image is already being served - it's basically UI work I added it to my next release. Side-by-side compare: also not yet. You can arrow-key between frames quickly in the preview, which works surprisingly well for "which of these is sharper," but there's no proper compare view like LR's. SD card speed: this is the part I specifically designed around. The app never reads full files to build the review grid - metadata comes from EXIF headers and thumbnails come from the embedded previews cameras write into every file, so scanning ~800 shots reads maybe 100 MB off the card instead of copying 20 GB. Same trick Photo Mechanic uses. Grid browsing feels instant even on slow cards; the only thing that hits the card hard is opening a full-res preview (one full file read, ~0.5-1s on UHS-I). So compared to your LR6 flow: Lightroom pays the full copy cost upfront - including all the shots you're about to delete - and then previews are fast from SSD. Mine pays almost nothing upfront and charges per full-res look. If you cull mostly at thumbnail/fullscreen level it's a big net win; if you 100%-zoom every single frame, import-first is still faster and I won't pretend otherwise. Prefetching the next frame while you view the current one is planned, which should hide most of that per-photo latency. Genuinely useful feedback I will add some improvements to v1.0.6.
Lightroom and the Windows/macOS photo apps all want to copy first and ask questions later, I tried Photo Mechanic solves it but costs $139, and Rapid Photo Downloader is Linux-only. You could also boot up a live Linux distro, and do everything there, all in RAM. For free.