Plan Photo Cull Days From Shots and Seconds — Free
Every frame you kept in the field is a decision waiting at home. Multiply the shots by the seconds a real cull takes, divide by the minutes you can give the edit each day, and book the days before the clients notice the silence.
The proof surface
Contact-sheet tools work out how many proof pages a shoot makes. This turns the same shoot into editing time — the days of culling the frames need at your measured pace — before the delivery promise is written.
Why the flat version breaks
Culling at unlimited speed
A rushed first pass moves the decisions into the retouch phase where they cost more.
Counting the seconds only, not the context switches
Compare views, colour tags and client notes multiply the seconds per frame.
Promising delivery before the cull is scheduled
Days the ladder prints are days the schedule must carry.
How to work the cull days ladder
The culled-on-import rejects are gone; the rows count what remains in the catalogue awaiting a real look.
Two seconds per frame is a fast first pass with shortcuts; four to six covers careful compare views. A catalogue shoot and a candid street session do not share a pace.
The minutes per day the edit genuinely gets — one quiet hour, not the whole evening you do not have.
The ladder reports cull days per shoot and totals them, flagging any job past a working week. A six-thousand-one-hundred-frame catalogue at three seconds needs over five days of an hour each — that number belongs in the delivery date, not in a hope.
What the cull days ladder replaces
| Question | Before | Visible working |
|---|---|---|
| Culling at unlimited speed | A rushed first pass moves the decisions into the retouch phase where they cost more. | Time one hundred frames honestly |
| Counting the seconds only, not the context switches | Compare views, colour tags and client notes multiply the seconds per frame. | Set the daily cull budget |
| Promising delivery before the cull is scheduled | Days the ladder prints are days the schedule must carry. | Book the days the ladder shows |
A local arithmetic aid replaces hand calculation, not expert review. No paid AI service is needed.
Run it on the samples, right here
FIRST-LOAD
Input is processed locally and a draft is saved automatically in this browser profile when storage is available. Reset to sample clears that draft; Pro history has its own clear button. A state link encodes your inputs in its URL: share only non-sensitive rows. Browser history, clipboard and anyone receiving the link may retain it. Optional AI use below leaves this device; it is not required.
Time arithmetic on the frame counts and paces you supply. Not photography-pricing, contract or copyright advice; delivery dates, usage terms and client expectations belong in your own written agreement.
Data note: Everything runs in this browser tab on the cull days ladder: your shoot | shots to cull | seconds spent per shot stays on this device, nothing is uploaded, and the reading is rebuilt only when you press run.
Go deeper: the companion app files the same reading as a climbing rung ladder
The article demo above runs without limits. The companion app keeps a local history, exports the rows as CSV, prints the cull days ladder reading, and holds your drafts on this device — one free run, then $ 4 one-time for the layer that keeps filing.
The cull days ladder reading is complete for free. The optional $4 layer adds print, row CSV and the last five local reading summaries; it does not add hidden answers. Checkout is not configured yet; the article demo remains unlimited.
Open the plan photo cull days from shots and seconds companionBoundary
Time arithmetic on the frame counts and paces you supply. Not photography-pricing, contract or copyright advice; delivery dates, usage terms and client expectations belong in your own written agreement.
What this is built on
- Method: The minutes per day the edit genuinely gets — one quiet hour, not the whole evening you do not have.
- All sample records are invented examples. The app does not fetch measurements, policies, files or personal records.
- Google’s official pricing page, fetched 2026-09-29, lists free-tier access including AI Studio. Optional formatting only; limits and availability can change. Free-tier content may be used to improve products. Never paste private records there.
Before: A rushed first pass moves the decisions into the retouch phase where they cost more. After: the cull days ladder shows the working beside each named row so the reader can change the assumption and inspect the consequence.
Optional AI formatting, not calculation
For this cull days ladder, use the free AI Studio interface only if available to you, with no paid API key. Manual entry completes the same workflow for free. Supply only fictional or non-sensitive notes. Review its output against the source; never paste unresolved questions into the numeric rows.
Format my non-sensitive notes for a cull days ladder. Return plain rows only: shoot | shots to cull | seconds spent per shot. Preserve supplied quantities exactly. Do not guess missing values; list questions separately. Do not calculate or add advice. I will check every row before pasting into the local tool.
Accepted schema: shoot | shots to cull | seconds spent per shot. No AI response is executed as code.