Comparison
BurstPick vs Tack
Both are built for the same problem: a wildlife photographer comes home with 3,000 frames and forty near-identical bursts of the same bird. Here's an honest account of how they compare — including the part where one of them isn't out yet.
First, the honest part
As of August 8, 2026, Tack is a waitlist. There is no public download and no way to buy it, so nobody can tell you how well it works — including us. Everything below about Tack is drawn from their own public site, and we've marked anything they haven't published as exactly that rather than guessing at it.
We're not going to tell you Tack is bad software. We haven't run it. What we can tell you is what BurstPick does today, so you can decide whether to wait or to cull the shoot sitting on your card right now.
Side by side
| BurstPick | Tack | |
|---|---|---|
| Availability | Shipping. Download and use it today. | Waitlist signup — no public download or purchase as of this writing. |
| Platforms | Windows, macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel), Linux | Not published |
| Where your photos go | Nowhere. All scoring is local — no cloud, no account, no telemetry. | States local processing, no cloud uploads. |
| Built for | Wildlife and action bursts — six criteria tuned on wildlife, not portraits. | Wildlife and bird photography. |
| Pricing | One-time perpetual license. $55 founding (first 100 buyers), then $89. 14-day trial, no card. | Not published |
| Lightroom / Capture One handoff | Picks and star ratings export as XMP sidecars. | Not published |
| Burst grouping | Automatic, with manual merge and split when it guesses wrong. | Not published |
Tack details sourced from wildlifecull.com, last verified August 8, 2026. “Not published” means they haven't stated it publicly — not that the feature is missing. We'll update this page when they ship.
What BurstPick actually scores
The reason wedding and portrait cullers feel off on wildlife files isn't that they're bad software — it's that they're scoring faces, and your 400-frame burst of a bird in flight doesn't have one. BurstPick scores six things instead:
- Focus
- Edge sharpness on the subject — not the branch behind it.
- Eye visibility
- Eye open, catchlight present, in focus.
- Exposure
- Recoverable highlights and shadow detail in the RAW.
- Composition
- Subject placement, headroom, leading space in the frame.
- Noise
- ISO-aware — grain is allowed, only banding and hot pixels are penalized.
- Context
- How the subject reads against its habitat.
Those six combine into one score per frame, and the likely keeper rises to the top of its burst. You confirm it from the keyboard — the software's job is to put the right frame in front of you, not to decide for you.
Where BurstPick falls down
- It doesn't identify species. If you want your birds named and sorted by species, BurstPick won't do that. Project Kestrel is free, open source, and does.
- Hard poses are still hard. Dense flocks, extreme flight poses, and birds facing straight down the lens are where eye detection is least reliable. It degrades to a neutral score rather than guessing, but it won't be as sharp as on a clean side-on subject.
- It's a culler, not an editor. No develop module, no export pipeline. It picks, and it hands off to Lightroom or Capture One.
- It's not free. One-time $89 ($55 for the first 100 buyers). If a perpetual license doesn't fit, Project Kestrel costs nothing.
Cull the shoot you already have
14-day trial, no account and no card. Nothing leaves your machine. If it doesn't earn its keep on your next shoot, there's a 30-day refund.
Download BurstPickWindows · macOS · Linux
Building Tack and think we've got something wrong here? Tell us and we'll correct it.