Why I built Cull Me uP

Photography came before everything else. Before the companies, before thirty years of building technology, before a single line of code — there was a camera.

My mother handed me a Zenith — a heavy SLR with TTL metering — and with it, a habit I never lost: to stop, and to look. I learned on film, on boxes of Ektachrome that cost real money to shoot and more to develop. Every frame asked a question before I pressed the shutter: is this worth keeping? That question was the whole craft.

Fifty years later, I still ask it. But somewhere along the way, the question got buried.

The cameras got faster. The cards got bigger. A single afternoon now comes home as thousands of RAW files. And in that flood, something quietly breaks. A photograph, at the instant it is made, is rich — a moment, a context, an intention. Then the card is imported, the folders multiply, the context fades, and the image falls back into a file. One among forty thousand. We have a word for where that fall ends: noise. But noise is not too much data. Noise is data that has lost its reference.

I built Cull Me uP to slow that fall.

Not to organize your files for you. Not to choose your photographs. To give back the thing my mother gave me: the time to look. A few years ago I sat down with my own archive and took that time — and I found pieces of my life waiting for me, exactly where I had left them. That is what CMP is for.

There is a line I will not cross, and I want to say it plainly. The software will never decide what matters. It can reveal — a photograph, a project, a pattern across years — but the judgment stays yours. I have spent thirty years around technology, long enough to distrust the promise that a machine should choose for you. Intelligence can reduce friction. It cannot have taste. The moment it decides, it has taken something that was never its to take.

And your work stays yours, all the way down — your files, your folders, your decisions. Delete Cull Me uP tomorrow and nothing breaks. That is not a feature. It is a form of respect.

I am not launching this to an audience. I am building it with photographers — on real shoots, real folders, real fatigue — because the best workflows come from practice, not from feature lists. If the way I have described photography sounds like your own, I would be honored to have you in the room early.

Thank you for taking the time to look.