How I cull wildlife bursts and hand the keepers to Lightroom Classic.

1. Open the shoot where it already lives.

My working photos stay on a portable SSD, and that is the folder I open in BurstPick. It reads the metadata, groups frames into bursts by capture time, builds thumbnails, and scores each frame. Scoring runs on my computer. The photos aren't uploaded, and the originals aren't modified.

This trip was 1,703 photos in 336 bursts. Each card in the grid is a burst showing its highest-scoring frame. Press Space on any photo for a quick full-screen look.

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2. Read the score, then make your own call.

The score panel shows why a frame ranked where it did. Four technical criteria (focus, eye visibility, exposure, and noise) and two subjective ones (composition and context) each carry a visible weight. Hover the information icon beside any criterion for an explanation.

The score gives me a starting point, especially between frames in the same burst. I still check focus, pose, expression, and anything distracting, and a lower score doesn't mean a photo gets rejected.

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3. Inspect the eye and compare close calls.

Press B to open a burst, turn on lock zoom, and press Z to zoom to the eye. Smart Zoom finds the subject in each frame, so the eye stays under the loupe as I scroll through the burst.

For a close decision, press C to compare up to four frames with pan and zoom synced. These prairie dog frames scored almost the same. I preferred the catchlight in one of them, so I promoted it to the burst cover (M) and crowned it as the keeper (K).

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4. Pick your keepers.

Back in the grid, the crowned frame represents the burst. Press P to pick a photo. A burst can contain more than one keeper when frames offer something different, like a head turned toward the camera. I picked eleven photos for this demonstration, and the rest of the shoot stays on the SSD.

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5. Review species tags before you export.

BurstPick suggests species for the folder, and I choose the ones I know are in the shoot. Then I check the labels. To change one, right-click a photo and choose Set species. The same menu can apply a change to a whole burst or a selection, so check the scope before you apply it.

One squirrel suggestion was wrong, and I didn't have a verified label to replace it with. I cleared the tag instead, because no keyword is better than a wrong one in your catalog.

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6. Copy keepers into an archive with XMP metadata.

With Write species tags as keywords turned on, I choose Archive keeper package. It copies the selected full-resolution files into a dated folder and writes XMP sidecars beside them. The folder date comes from the photos' capture dates. For this trip the result was Archive / 2026 / 2026-09-27_Colorado Trip / RAW.

The source photos stay where they were. The sidecars carry the pick rating, color label, and reviewed species keywords. They are metadata files, not extra copies of the images.

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7. Import into Lightroom Classic with Add.

In Lightroom Classic's Import window, I select the exported RAW folder and use Add. That catalogs the archive copies where they already are, without moving them.

With my export settings, a pick arrives as five stars and a green label. The species keywords arrive too, including their hierarchy, so the mountain bluebird and the elk are already keyworded. Those five stars record the pick. They aren't a measure of photographic quality.

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How the handoff works with other editors

8. Edit, and back up separately.

From here the keepers are ready to edit. BurstPick handles the cull and the metadata handoff, and Lightroom handles the catalog and the edit.

The keeper package holds the selected photos. It isn't a backup of the full shoot, and importing into Lightroom doesn't create one. I keep an independent backup of the original folder and back up the archive separately.

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