User Manual

BurstPick scores and curates RAW burst photos locally on your machine — no cloud, no uploads, no account. Point it at a folder of photos and it groups your bursts, scores every frame on focus, eyes, exposure, composition, noise, and context, and helps you pick the keepers fast. Your originals are never modified unless you explicitly export with Move.

This manual is a complete reference. Use the section list on the left to jump around.

What BurstPick is for. BurstPick is a fast, wildlife-tuned cull tool: it helps you find the keeper in each burst and clear a shoot quickly. It is not a catalog or library manager, and it is not a general-purpose photo grader — the scoring is tuned for wildlife and birds, and frames where no animal is detected are pushed to the bottom so they don't surface as picks. Pair it with Lightroom or Capture One for cataloging and editing; BurstPick hands your picks back via flags and XMP sidecars.

Getting started

1. Open a folder — drag it onto the window, or use File → Open Folder… (Ctrl+O).
2. BurstPick scans the folder, reads each photo's capture time and camera settings, generates thumbnails, groups frames shot close together into bursts, and scores every frame.
3. Progress shows at the top while this runs. You can start reviewing as soon as photos appear — scoring fills in behind you.

How long will it take? A big folder of RAW files takes a while — BurstPick is running real per-photo analysis on your machine, not just reading embedded previews. So it tells you up front rather than leaving you guessing: a large folder gets a heads-up as soon as its size is known, and once the scan has enough to go on, a time-remaining estimate appears on the progress screen. The estimate is deliberately shown in coarse steps and won't flicker with every photo — it holds steady and counts down, and only climbs if the scan genuinely slows down and stays slow.

Because you can start reviewing before scoring finishes, that status follows you: a small chip in the toolbar keeps showing the scan's progress and estimate while you work in the grid, and it clears itself when the scan is done. If you switch to a different folder entirely, the scan you left behind reports from a toast instead.

When you reopen BurstPick it resumes your last folder automatically (turn this off in Settings → General if you prefer to start empty). All your picks, rejects, score overrides, and view settings are saved per folder, so you can quit and pick up exactly where you left off.

Supported formats include common RAW files (.nef, .cr2, .cr3, .arw, .raf, .dng, .rw2, .orf) plus .jpg, .heic, and .tif. If you shoot RAW+JPEG, BurstPick stacks each pair and treats the RAW as the master.

The grid

The grid is built around your bursts. Each burst shows as a single cover — its suggested best frame, with a compact info bar (frame count, capture span, and the gap that triggered the split, e.g. "1.4 s gap → new burst") — so you can skim a whole shoot one keeper at a time. Covers and single (non-burst) photos pack together into rows.

Expand a burst to see all its frames in place: click the cover's info bar (the chevron), or click the stacked-card edge. The burst breaks out into its own labeled section showing every frame; click the ▾ on that section's header to collapse it again. The section header also carries a Survey N / Compare button that opens all the burst's frames in Compare (see Comparing frames). Single photos are never grouped — they're just cards.

Collapse all / Expand all (toolbar, or the View → Bursts menu) sets the default for the whole grid: everything collapsed (the fast skim) or everything open (every frame visible). After you hand-expand or collapse individual bursts, the control reads Mixed. Your default posture is remembered between sessions; per-burst choices reset when you open a new folder.

• Status filters the working set to Active (your unflagged + flagged working set), Picked, Rejected, or Exported. Switch from the toolbar dropdown, or just click the matching count in the header: the ✓ picked, ✗ rejected, and (once you've exported anything) → exported chips jump straight to that view, and clicking the photo total returns you to Active.

Sorting & grouping — open the Sort & group popover in the toolbar (it summarizes the current state, e.g. "Bursts Score · Frames Time"). It holds two controls:

• Grouping — Bursts keeps the burst-grouped grid (the default). Flat drops all grouping and lays every frame out in one globally ranked list — handy for picking the strongest shots across a whole shoot at once. There are no burst covers, separators, or collapse controls in Flat. Your choice is remembered between sessions.
• Sort — bursts and frames sort independently. Bursts orders the bursts relative to each other by Score (best burst first — the default) or Time (the order you shot them). Frames (labeled Order in Flat) sets the order within each burst, again by Score (default) or Time — this is also the order you step through when you open a burst for review.

So you can keep your bursts in shooting order while each one still shows its best frame first. Press O to flip the frame sort from anywhere (Shift+O flips the burst order).

Filters (in the Filters popover):

• Minimum score — hide low-scoring frames with the slider.
• ISO and Focal length — narrow to a range from your EXIF.
• Camera Body — in a multi-camera shoot, narrow the grid to one or more bodies. Check the cameras you want; leave them all unchecked to show everything.
• Text search — match on filename, or switch to EXIF mode to search camera model, lens, and body.
• Keywords — when your photos carry IPTC/XMP keywords (the tags Lightroom or Photo Mechanic embed in the file), a Keywords list appears, each keyword with a photo count. Check one or more to show only photos carrying at least one of them; leave them all unchecked to show everything. It combines with the other filters, and Reset Filters clears it. Keywords are read while scanning, so a folder scanned with an earlier version needs a rescan to pick them up.

Badges on cards:

• A collapsed burst cover shows its info bar — a chevron, the frame count, the capture span, and the split gap — and a gray stacked-card edge meaning "this is a burst." Click the bar (or the edge) to expand the burst in place. A small ✓ / ✗ in the bar means a frame inside the burst is already picked or rejected, so a flagged frame never feels lost when the burst is closed.
• When a burst is expanded, its best frame is marked with a focal-cyan ★ star — BurstPick's suggestion for that burst, not a flag you've set. Click the star, or press B, to open Burst Review and step through every frame full-screen.
• An amber "nearly tied" badge on a burst cover means the top frames scored within a hair of each other — the suggested pick is a close call, so it's worth opening the burst and deciding yourself.
• In a multi-camera shoot, the cover shows the camera body next to the frame count, so two bodies fired at once stay easy to tell apart.
• A 🔒 badge means you've edited that burst by hand. Locked bursts are frozen against re-detection — see Organizing bursts.

Organizing bursts

BurstPick groups your frames into bursts automatically, but you're always in charge — you can reshape any burst by hand, and your edits stick across rescans and gap changes.

Selecting bursts vs frames. The grid keeps whole-burst selection separate from single-frame selection. Click a collapsed cover to select the burst; click a frame (inside an expanded burst, or anywhere in Flat grouping) to select that frame. Shift-click or Ctrl-click (Cmd on macOS) extends the selection — bursts with bursts, frames with frames. A small action bar appears showing "2 bursts selected" (or "3 selected" for frames) with the actions available.

Merge. Select two or more bursts and press M, or click Merge, to combine them into one. With a single burst selected, the action bar also offers Merge ← and Merge → to fold in the burst just before or after it in time. If a merge is large (more than 40 frames) or spans two camera bodies, BurstPick asks you to confirm first. Every merge can be undone from the toast that follows — or with Ctrl+Z (Cmd+Z on macOS) afterwards, which reverses your most recent edit (merge, split, move, detach, or a pick/reject).

Split. Select one burst and press S, or click Split, to open the split strip, then choose the frame where the burst should break in two. Split burst… is also on the burst's right-click menu.

Move, detach, and build bursts. Right-click a frame for Move to previous burst, Move to next burst, or Detach into new burst. Select several frames first and you get Create new burst from N frames. Right-click a burst's header for the merge and split actions plus Select all frames in burst, flag-the-whole-burst shortcuts, and Move burst to Trash….

Edited bursts stay locked. Any burst you change by hand is locked and shows a 🔒 badge. Re-detecting bursts (below) leaves locked bursts untouched, so adjusting the gap never silently undoes your work.

Re-detect at a different gap. A new burst starts whenever the gap between two shots exceeds a threshold. To re-group the shoot you're looking at, open Sort & group → Burst detection and pick Tighter (more, smaller bursts), Default, or Looser (fewer, larger bursts) — or click Adjust… for a fine slider with a live "Preview: N bursts" count and an Undo. To change the starting gap for new folders instead, use Settings → General.

Reviewing & flagging

Flagging is built for speed, with the mouse or the keyboard.

Hover or select any card and click ✓ Keep to mark it a pick, or ✕ Reject to reject it — click the same button again to unmark. The keyboard does the same and auto-advances to the next frame:

• P — Pick (the same as Keep). BurstPick auto-advances to the next unflagged frame.
• X — Reject it. Also auto-advances.
• U — Unmark (clear the flag).
• Delete — move to Trash. The file (plus its .xmp sidecar and any stacked JPEG) goes to your system Recycle Bin / Trash, so it's recoverable; BurstPick re-picks the burst's best frame if you delete the current pick. A confirmation appears every time, and an Undo appears right after — click it within a few seconds and the frame drops straight back into the grid, instantly, because nothing is touched during the undo window: the cached images are still there, so there's no waiting for the frame to be decoded again. After the window closes, recover it from your Recycle Bin / Trash. You can also right-click → Move to Trash. Once a delete is final, the cached versions of that photo are cleaned up for you — see Settings → Storage.

Move around with the arrow keys: ← → step through frames, ↑ ↓ move by a full row in the grid. Shift+← / Shift+→ jump to the next or previous burst.

Representatives. Each burst has one suggested best frame (its "representative"). If you disagree, select a better frame and press R to pin it as the representative (Shift+R to unpin).

Batch flagging. From the toolbar overflow (⋯) menu, set a score threshold and flag everything above it as Pick in one click — optionally limited to representatives only.

Acting on a whole selection. Select several photos, or several collapsed burst covers, and every flag action applies to the whole selection — from the action bar that appears, from the right-click menu, or from the keyboard (P, X, U, and 1–5). The action bar for a burst selection carries Pick covers, Reject covers, and Clear flags alongside Merge and Split; a photo selection gets Pick, Reject, Clear flag, quick-export, Rescore, and the 1–5 score chips. The photo right-click menu carries the flag actions too, and its Re-score and Move to Trash… entries act on the selection rather than just the photo under the cursor.

Two rules keep this predictable:

• Selecting bursts flags covers. Picking a dozen collapsed bursts is a decision about a dozen photos — the best frame of each — not about the hundred-odd frames behind them. Flags and manual scores land on the covers you selected and can see, so U (or clicking the cover's button again) takes it all back without opening a single burst. Actions where you really do mean the whole burst — Move to Trash, quick-export, and Re-score — still cover every frame. Buttons and menu items name what they are about to touch, so the difference is visible before you click: "Flag 12 covers as Pick" against "Move 12 bursts to Trash…".
• One toggles, many set. With a single burst or photo selected, P picks it and P again un-picks it, as it always has. With two or more selected, P sets them all to Pick rather than flipping each one — a mixed selection has nothing coherent to flip. Buttons and menu items always set, never toggle, because they name an outcome.

Right-clicking something outside the current selection acts on just that item, so a stray right-click never fires on a selection you had forgotten about. Select all frames in burst now opens the burst first, so the frames it selects are ones you can see and act on. Esc clears the selection.

The lightbox

Press Enter to open the lightbox — a full-resolution view for judging a single frame. By default, double-clicking a frame jumps straight into its burst review (change this in Settings → Viewing).

• B — switch into burst review: the filmstrip narrows to just this burst's frames so you can flip between siblings.
• Z — toggle between fit and 100% (double-clicking the photo does the same). From there, scroll or pinch to zoom further, and drag to pan. The on-image "100% (Z)" button does the same toggle. Z lands on a true 100% even on a frame you've just arrowed to and never zoomed into, and pressing it the instant you arrive is safe — it waits the fraction of a second the frame needs instead of jumping to some other magnification.
• Zoom past 100%. Keep scrolling past 100% and you can magnify up to 400% — useful for deciding which of two frames has the crisper catch light. The wheel parks on 100% on the way through, so that reference point stays easy to land on; keep scrolling and it passes through a moment later. Above 100% the zoom readout turns amber to mark that you're looking at magnified pixels rather than new detail, and clicking it returns you to 100%. From above 100%, Z (or a double-click) snaps back to 100% first and collapses to fit on the next press.
• Shift+Z — return to last zoom: after you've zoomed in to a spot (say, 100% on an eye) and dropped back to fit, this jumps straight back to that exact level and position. Press it again to return to fit. The remembered framing is per-frame — it clears when you move to another photo.
• L — lock the current zoom and pan so it holds as you move between frames. Ideal for checking the same eye across a burst at 100%. Moving between frames of different shapes is handled for you: arrowing from a horizontal frame to a vertical one re-checks your pan against the frame you're arriving at, so the image can't end up pushed halfway out of the viewport with black filling the gap. This applies whether or not Smart Zoom is on.
• Smart Zoom — the labeled pill beside Lock zoom, off by default while the eye-tracking behind it is still being refined. Turn it on and BurstPick follows whatever detail is under your loupe from frame to frame — matching the actual pixels as the bird shifts, instead of holding a fixed spot — and re-centers on the subject only when that tracking has genuinely lost it. Double-click a detected eye and it snaps to that eye, in this frame and in every one you step to. The pill lights up when it's active, and clicking it again is the off-switch. Your choice is remembered between launches. Mouse-wheel zoom is unaffected — it always follows your cursor. (This was previously an unlabeled menu called Eye relative.)
• Smart Zoom leaves framing you chose by hand alone. If you frame something deliberately — a second animal, a wingtip, a detail off to one side — arrowing to the next frame keeps you there rather than snapping the view onto whatever BurstPick decided the subject was. It counts as your choice however you got there: dragging the image, rolling the wheel or pinching with the pointer over the spot you want, or double-clicking that spot. The Z key and the 100% button don't claim a new spot, because they aim themselves at the detected subject rather than at something you pointed to; they leave whatever you had already chosen in place. Smart Zoom still pulls the view back when the tracker is the thing that wandered off the bird, which is what it's for; the difference is who moved the loupe last. It also can't push the view past the edge of the photo any more, so you won't get a black band down one side. Note the two paths differ in how tightly they can hold: once BurstPick has built a preview of the frame you're moving to, it follows the actual pixels you framed and your spot barely moves. Before that preview exists — during the scan, and on the first frames of a folder you've just opened — it can only shift your view by however far the detected subject moved between the two frames, so if you're looking at something other than the subject, expect a small nudge rather than a perfectly held position.
• F — cycle focus peaking, which traces the sharpest edges so you can confirm focus landed where you want: Off → Contrast edges → Fine details → Both. Marks are graded — a strong edge is drawn brighter than a marginal one, with a bright core and a softer edge — so peaking reads as strokes following fur, feathers, and grass rather than a bright mat, and a soft frame visibly quiets down next to a sharp one. How much of a frame lights up tracks how much real detail is there, so empty sky and smooth backgrounds stay clean even at high ISO. Set the mode, the opacity, and whether the photo dims behind the marks in Settings → Viewing.
• Shift+F — jump peaking straight to off from any mode, so you don't have to cycle through the other three to kill the marks for a clean look at the photo. Press it again to restore exactly the mode you left. Works the same way in Compare.
• I — cycle the info overlay: off, a minimal capture strip (camera, lens, ISO, shutter, aperture), or the full curation panel with the score breakdown.
• T — peek the candidate strip, a ranked row of the burst's top frames (shown automatically for close-call bursts).
• E — open the photo in an external editor (configure editors in Settings → Export).
• , / . — rotate the view a quarter turn left / right for review (the ↺ ↻ buttons on the toolbar do the same). This is display-only — it never changes the file or its orientation tag — and it resets to upright when you move to a different burst. Handy for inspecting portrait frames, or any body that didn't record its orientation. Zoom and pan work normally while rotated.
• ` (backtick) — stage-only mode, hiding all chrome for a clean full-screen look. Press it again to bring the chrome back.
• Esc — step back out: dismiss the candidate strip, then leave burst review, then close the lightbox.

Framing near an eye is not the same as aiming at one. Composing on a nose, a beak, or a catch light slightly off to one side used to be read as "you want the eye", and the next frame pulled you onto it — on a frame-filling animal there was no way to compose a head without landing in that zone. Only a deliberate double-click on an eye counts as aiming at it now, and that still snaps, in the lightbox and across every Compare tile. Everything else follows the detail you actually framed.

Arrowing quickly is safe. If a second arrow press lands before the next photo has finished loading, Smart Zoom holds your framing for that step instead of guessing, and picks tracking back up on the next one.

Studying the background? Turn Smart Zoom off. Smart Zoom tracks relative to the animal, so a spot that isn't on the animal inherits the animal's movement — park the loupe on background flowers and they drift frame to frame as the subject moves. Lock zoom on its own holds a genuinely fixed position, which is what you want for comparing background detail across a burst.

Peaking lasts for the session. Once you turn it on it stays on as you move between frames, between bursts, and between the lightbox and Compare — so you can work a whole shoot with it up rather than switching it back on every frame. It starts off again the next time you launch BurstPick, so a photo never opens dimmed and marked up days later with no obvious cause. Your opacity and dimming choices are remembered between launches; it's only whether peaking is on that resets. Shift+F doesn't count as changing your mind about the session — it's a "look, then put it back" gesture, so pressing it doesn't lose track of the mode you were in.

When focus peaking appears. Peaking is measured on the full-size image rather than on a preview, so it shows up once that image has loaded instead of the instant a frame opens — and then it stays put. It used to be recalculated several times as sharper versions loaded behind it, so the marks you saw on opening weren't measuring the same pixels as the marks a second later. On machines with a capable graphics card the measurement runs at full sensor resolution, which is what makes the marks read as fine strokes; other machines measure on a smaller copy and get slightly coarser marks. BurstPick chooses the path for you — there is nothing to configure — and records which one your machine used in the diagnostics bundle (Help → About BurstPick → Export Diagnostics).

While peaking is getting ready. The full-size image isn't always on hand the moment you press F — a RAW you're opening for the first time, or one you last looked at in an earlier session, may still need it produced. BurstPick asks for it as soon as you turn peaking on and tells you it's working: a Focus peaking — preparing the full-resolution image… badge sits at the top of the frame, and the background dimming holds off until there are marks to make legible, so the photo stays at normal brightness instead of going dark on you. Both the lightbox and Compare do this, and in Compare each frame reports for itself. Earlier versions waited silently on some frames and could wait forever; that's fixed.

In Compare, the tiles light up together. Peaking is measured one frame at a time, so the marks used to appear on one tile a beat before the next — which is the opposite of what you want when the whole point is comparing them side by side. Now the results are held and shown at the same moment. Peaking also no longer runs for the view you aren't looking at, so switching between the lightbox and Compare doesn't leave the hidden one working ahead of the frames on your screen.

If the peaks can't be computed at all, the badge says so plainly instead of sitting on "preparing" indefinitely. A frame that genuinely has nothing to mark — empty sky, a smooth background — is a normal result, not an error, and simply shows no marks.

Comparing frames

Compare lays a burst's frames out together so you can choose between near-identical shots. Three ways in: press C on a burst, click the Survey / Compare button on an expanded burst's header, or right-click a frame → Compare in burst.

How Compare opens depends on the burst size:

• Small bursts open straight into the judging view, starting with two frames side by side — your gold Champion (BurstPick's current best) on the left and its closest contender on the right. That's the common champion-versus-candidate call; bring in more with + Add frame (below), up to four.
• Bigger bursts open on a survey wall first: every frame as a light, fast tile with its score and a single band-colored sharpness dot (hover it for the exact focus and eye read-outs), so you can skim the whole burst at a glance. Tap the frames you like — or press Enter on the highlighted one — to promote them (up to four), then click Judge these (J) to send those finalists to the judging view. [ and ] shrink or grow the survey tiles; the arrow keys move the highlight around the wall without committing anything.

Judging your finalists. In the judging view you weigh two to four frames together:

• One frame is always the gold Champion, and it always sits in the leftmost slot. Press M, or click ↑ Promote in the Compare bar, to promote the highlighted frame to Champion: it slides into that leftmost spot and the previous Champion drops into the frame's old place (staying in the set as a contender), so your current pick is always on the left. The frame you just demoted briefly flashes so you can see where it went. Promoting is a view-only rearrangement — it flags nothing and pins nothing, which is what separates it from crowning below. The button sits beside ★ Crown keeper and grays out when the frame you're on is already the Champion.
• Add more frames with the + Add frame button in the Compare bar (or the + key). It reads + Add frame · N/4 so you can see how many are in play, and brings in the next-best frame not already up, to a maximum of four. The Champion stays on the left and nothing else reshuffles; the button disappears once four are up.
• ← / → scrub the highlighted contender through the rest of the burst — swap a different frame in to weigh it without leaving the view. The Champion stays put.
• Tab moves the highlight between frames. Backspace drops the highlighted frame from the set (you always keep at least one). Click a frame in the filmstrip to add or remove it, up to four.
• Press K to crown the Champion — that flags it as your Pick and pins it as the burst's best frame, and confirms with a brief message. The crowned frame keeps a gold ★ Best badge so you can tell at a glance which one you locked in, and Compare stays open for a last look.
• Flag, rate, or open any highlighted frame just as you would elsewhere: P / X / U, 1–5, R to pin it as the representative, E for an external editor. Enter opens the highlighted frame full-screen.
• If you reached the judging view by surveying a big burst, a Triage crumb appears in the breadcrumb — click it (or ← Back to triage) to return to the survey wall.

Zoom in together. By default each frame pans and zooms independently, so you can frame each one on its own subject (e.g. each bird's eye). Press L to sync pan/zoom, where moving one frame mirrors onto the others — ideal for checking the same detail across the set; Re-sync snaps them all back to the Champion's framing. Turn on Smart Zoom (the labeled pill in the Compare bar, off by default) and BurstPick holds whatever detail is under your loupe in the same spot as you step through frames, re-finding that point in each one instead of holding a fixed position — and in Compare each tile re-finds it in its own frame. Double-click a bird's eye and every tile lands on its own bird's eye. Z toggles the highlighted frame between fit and 100%, and both panes land on the same true 100% even before you've zoomed either of them. Zoom runs to 400% here too, so two catch lights can be put side by side and magnified together. Your sync choice is remembered for the session.

Move between bursts without leaving. Shift+← / Shift+→ step Compare to the previous or next burst in the grid's order — the same shortcut the grid and Burst Review use. Compare re-opens on that burst the way it would have on its own (survey wall for a big one, judging view for a small one), so you can work a shoot burst by burst without backing out each time. It stops at the first and last burst rather than wrapping around.

, / . (or the ↺ ↻ toolbar buttons) rotate all frames a quarter turn for review — display-only, and reset when you compare a different burst. Flag straight from any frame, then press Esc to step back (survey wall, then out). Press ? any time in Compare for the full key legend.

Comparing across bursts? Compare works within one burst. To weigh a frame from one burst against a frame from another (e.g. two near-identical bird sequences), first merge the two bursts in the grid — select both and press M — then compare across the combined set. Merge only re-groups the frames, never re-scores them, and it's undoable.

Understanding the score

What the number means. The score is a quality estimate, not a grade. Its most important job is ranking frames within a burst so the top frame is the one BurstPick suggests as the burst's best frame — comparisons are most meaningful between siblings of the same burst, less so between unrelated photos across a shoot. That suggested best frame (the ★) is simply the highest composite in the burst; marking a frame a Pick is your own decision, separate from the suggestion. Use the number to break ties and skim quickly; trust your own eye when you disagree (that's what the override is for).

Every frame gets a composite score from 0–100, blended from six criteria:

Presets (in Settings → Scoring) re-weight the criteria for different goals:

• Default — balanced across all six.
• Sharpness Priority — leans hard on focus and eye visibility.

Adjusting the score. The Adjust scoring button in the toolbar opens a panel beside your grid, and the grid re-ranks live as you change things — no rescan, and nothing is saved until you choose to. It's the one place to shape a preset, in two sections:

• What matters most — the six criteria as relative-importance sliders. Drag one up and the rest rebalance automatically to keep the mix balanced, so there's no total to manage. This is where you set the weighting. The Calibrate from my picks… button fills it in for you by learning from the frames you've already picked.
• Situations — situational preferences (penalties and rewards) layered on top of the weighting, for cases like hidden eyes or high-ISO noise.

When you're happy, click Save & use and give the preset a name — keep a preset's own name to update it in place, or type a new one to save a copy (no more automatic "(tuned)" duplicates). Cancel reverts everything. You can also open the panel from Settings → Scoring → Adjust scoring…, or from any preset's Edit button under Manage presets….

Start from a goal. The panel offers one-click starter recipes that set sensible Situations preferences for a scenario — Balanced, Don't punish hidden eyes, Habitat / small-in-frame, High-ISO / low light, or Strict keepers. The chip you pick highlights and shows a one-line explanation just below the row; fine-tune from there.

The Situations controls, each dragged right for more effect:

• Frames with no animal — how hard to demote shots where no subject was detected: Off, Soft, or Strong (the default).
• Hidden or turned-away head — how hard to dock a subject when its eye and head aren't clearly visible (sharpness may be reading the wrong part of the frame): Off, Gentle, Standard (the default), or Strict.
• Closed or blinking eyes — how hard to dock a frame whose eye is shut or half-open, from lenient to strict.
• Rule-of-thirds placement — how much to reward subjects placed off-center on the thirds lines, from ignore to reward.
• Forgive high-ISO noise — how forgiving to be of noise from high ISO, measured in stops (from −2 stricter to +2 more forgiving).
• Preferred framing — favor Small in frame (habitat), Balanced, or Tight portrait subjects.

A sharp side-on (profile) shot isn't penalized — it's a classic wildlife framing.

Changes apply live on any folder scanned with this version (older sessions need a rescan for the per-frame preferences). Reset sliders returns the preferences to their defaults, and they travel with the preset when you export it.

A note on the displayed number when you concentrate the sliders. The 0–100 scale you see is fitted to the normal case of several criteria contributing at once — blending six numbers pulls everything toward the middle, so the scale spreads the top end back out to keep good frames distinguishable from average ones. That stretch is only correct when there is a blend. If you push the importance sliders onto a single criterion, the composite simply is that criterion, so BurstPick shows it unscaled — a Focus-only preset reads out the Focus score itself. Presets that mix two or more criteria are unaffected, as are Default and Sharpness Priority. Either way this only changes the number on screen: the ranking within a burst, and which frame is suggested as the best, are the same.

Overriding a score. If you disagree with BurstPick, set your own rating: select a photo and press 1–5 (mapping to 20, 40, 60, 80, 100) — in the grid, the lightbox, or compare — or click the rating stamps in the curation panel. Alt+1–Alt+5 does the same thing if you prefer an unambiguous chord. Your override wins everywhere the score is shown.

Why this score? Open the curation panel — the inspector rail beside the photo — to see the per-criterion breakdown for the selected frame. Expand Why this score? inside it for the working underneath: what was detected, which situational preferences applied, and the raw per-criterion reads. The Subject type line reads Bird or Mammal. That single distinction is all the scoring uses — every mammal from a cat to a giraffe is handled identically — and BurstPick does not identify species.

Exporting

Quick export moves or copies your flagged photos into subfolders next to your originals:

• Ctrl+S — export your picks to a Picks folder.
• Ctrl+R — export your rejects to a Rejects folder.
• Hold Shift with either to invert copy/move for that one action.

By default quick export moves files and flags the current photo as it goes (Ctrl+S picks, Ctrl+R rejects). A small MOVE / COPY pill in the toolbar always shows which one the next quick export will do, so a keystroke never surprises you; change the default in Settings → Export. The first time you run a move, BurstPick confirms it once.

Full export (the toolbar Export button) lets you choose a destination and options:

• Size — Full resolution, 2048px (sharing), or 1200px (web).
• Prefix filenames with score — e.g. 087_DSC1234.jpg (zero-padded to three digits), so files sort by quality.
• Write XMP sidecars — Lightroom-compatible .xmp files carrying your rating and flag (Pick → 5 stars + green label, Reject → red label). Great for handing curation back to Lightroom.

Copy vs Move. Copy leaves your originals untouched (the default for full export). Move relocates them instead, which changes your source folder, so use it deliberately.

Write ratings to your originals (XMP). To hand your picks to Lightroom or Capture One without moving a single file, use Write XMP to Source — on the toolbar, in the File menu, or by right-clicking a photo → Write XMP sidecar. It writes a Lightroom-compatible .xmp file next to each original in place (Pick → 5 stars + green label, Reject → red label) and never moves or copies anything. You can run it at any point in your cull, even if you've only marked rejects.

A sidecar written by another app is always left untouched. This is the one limit worth knowing before you use it. If you have already imported the folder into Lightroom Classic or darktable with their write-XMP-on-the-fly option on, every file already carries a sidecar holding their edit history — crop, exposure, the lot. BurstPick will not overwrite it, because doing so would throw that work away. Those photos are reported as skipped, and the message tells you why: "N photos already had a sidecar from another app (Lightroom or darktable); BurstPick left it untouched." The Overwrite existing .xmp files setting does not change this — it only applies to sidecars BurstPick itself wrote.

What to do about it. The clean workflow is to cull in BurstPick before importing into your catalog, so BurstPick's ratings are in the sidecar the catalog reads on import. If the folder is already imported, your options are to read the ratings in from the export path instead (a full export with Write XMP sidecars on, into a new folder), or to merge BurstPick's xmp:Rating and xmp:Label into the existing sidecar by hand — testers have confirmed Lightroom reads a hand-merged sidecar correctly with its own settings intact. Merging into a third-party sidecar automatically is not something BurstPick does today.

"N photos had an outdated namespace repaired." If you see this in the message after writing sidecars, nothing has gone wrong and nothing of yours has changed. Sidecars written by earlier versions of BurstPick carried an internal identifier that pointed at a web address we don't own, and BurstPick now corrects that line in place the next time it writes to the folder. Your ratings, flags, and keywords are left byte for byte as they were — only the identifier is rewritten — and sidecars from other apps are never touched. It happens once per file, so the count drops to zero on the next run.

Sidecar filename. Lightroom looks for DSC_1234.xmp. darktable and digiKam look for the name that keeps the file extension, DSC_1234.NEF.xmp. Settings → Export → Lightroom / XMP → Sidecar filename lets you pick Adobe / Lightroom, darktable / digiKam, or Both — the default, which writes one file of each with identical contents. Whichever you choose, BurstPick reads, moves, and trashes both names, so changing the setting never strands sidecars you already have, and it never overwrites a sidecar it did not write — if you have already imported a folder into darktable, the sidecar holding your edit history is left exactly as it is. Once a photo is in darktable's library, darktable's own database takes precedence, so culling before import is the clean workflow.

Score keywords

Stars are the only score Lightroom reads today. They crush six criteria into five buckets and they collide with your own star workflow. Settings → Export → Score Keywords writes each score into its own keyword instead — BurstPick|Focus|95-100, BurstPick|Flag|Pick, and BurstPick|Burst|Best for the frame that won its burst — which Lightroom shows in the Metadata panel, the Library Filter, and smart collections.

It is off by default. Turn on Write scores as Lightroom keywords and you choose:

• Top-level keyword — everything nests under this one name, so it collapses to a single row in your keyword list. Leave it as BurstPick, or change it to match a convention you already run.
• Keyword style — Both (the default), Hierarchical only, or Flat only. See below.
• Include — which criteria get tagged. Overall score, Focus, the Pick / Reject flag, and Best frame in burst are on to start; Eye visibility, Exposure, Composition, Noise, and Context are there when you want them.

Keywords are written by the same actions that write your ratings: Write XMP to Source, and a full export with XMP sidecars turned on. Keywords already on your files are carried through, and re-scoring replaces BurstPick's old bands rather than stacking a second contradictory set on top. Lightroom only reads a sidecar at import or via Metadata → Read Metadata from File.

Keyword style. Lightroom Classic reads hierarchical keywords and nests BurstPick's tags into one collapsible BurstPick row. The Lightroom desktop app and most non-Adobe catalogs read only flat keywords, and would show you nothing at all. BurstPick writes both by default: the hierarchical BurstPick|Focus|95-100 and the flat BurstPick-Focus-95-100, which say the same thing in two spellings. If the extra flat rows clutter your keyword list in Classic, switch Keyword style to Hierarchical in Settings → Export → Score Keywords.

Every flat keyword names its criterion, so a Focus of 92 and an overall score of 92 stay two separate keywords you can filter on independently.

Score bands. Scores are written as bands rather than exact numbers. The bands are finer at the top — 95-100, 90-94, 85-89, 80-84, 75-79, 70-74 — and coarser below, at 60-69, 40-59 and 0-39, because that is where culling decisions actually live.

Keywords travel with your exported JPEGs. Lightroom includes every keyword in files you export unless you untick Include on Export for that keyword in the Keyword List. The hierarchical tags all nest under one top-level keyword (BurstPick by default) so you only untick it once; the flat tags are separate rows that all start with the same name, so they sort together.

Flat keywords need a folder BurstPick has read keywords from. They are written into dc:subject alongside the keywords already on your files, and BurstPick will not write that field for a folder it never read — doing so would tell Lightroom our tags are the file's whole keyword list. If you see "Flat keywords skipped: N photos need a rescan first" after writing, scan the folder again and write once more.

Live updates

While a folder is open, BurstPick keeps watching it so your session stays in step with the disk — you don't have to rescan every time you add or remove files. A small status chip in the toolbar shows the current state:

• ● Live — the folder is being watched. New photos are scored and staged automatically, and files removed on disk are flagged as missing.
• ⏸ Paused — you paused the watch (see below).
• ⏸ Paused — drive disconnected — the source drive went away; reconnect it and watching resumes on its own.

New photos. When frames land in the folder — a tethered shoot, a card copy — BurstPick scores them in the background and shows a + N new • Add chip. Click it to fold them into the grid, placed and grouped in order, with an Undo — so your review isn't yanked around mid-cull.

Resuming a big batch. If a large batch of unscored frames turns up at once — most often when you reopen a folder whose scan was interrupted — BurstPick treats it as resuming the scan rather than a quiet drop-in: a Resuming scan progress bar appears and the frames flow into the grid automatically as they finish, so you see the work pick up where it left off instead of waiting behind the + N new chip. A handful of files added during a live shoot still stage quietly for you to add on your own terms.

Missing photos. If files leave the folder, a ⚠ N missing chip appears. Click it to review just those frames; their flags are kept, so nothing is lost if the files come back. A Rescan clears them for good.

Pause and resume. Click the Live chip to pause watching — it switches to Paused. While paused, BurstPick ignores files added to or removed from the folder, so nothing shifts under you while you work. Click Paused to resume: watching re-arms and a one-time catch-up picks up everything that changed while you were away. Your choice sticks — the watch stays paused across relaunches until you resume it, and reconnecting a drive won't override a pause you set yourself.

BurstPick also checks the folder when you come back to the window after working elsewhere — except while a scan is still running, where it waits for the scan to finish first. Switching away from BurstPick mid-scan and switching back no longer slows the scan down.

Check for changes and Rescan. Both live in the toolbar overflow (⋯) menu. Check for changes finds new and missing files on demand without rescoring — handy while paused, or any time you want to sync right now. Rebuild & rescore (Rescan) starts the folder over from scratch; it clears your flags, so BurstPick asks first.

Settings reference

Open settings with the ⚙ toolbar button or the ? key (which jumps straight to the Shortcuts tab). The toolbar's ? Help button is a one-stop entry point too — it opens the User Manual, the keyboard shortcuts, or a quick refresher on what the scores mean. The tabs:

• General — resume last session, show flag progress, and the default Burst detection gap for new folders (how close in time two shots must be to count as one burst; default 500 ms, adjustable 250–3000 ms). Tightening it splits loose sequences into more, smaller bursts; loosening it folds nearby shots together. To re-group the folder you're already in, use Sort & group → Burst detection instead (see Organizing bursts).
• Scoring — the active preset (dropdown), Adjust scoring… (opens the panel — see Understanding the score), Calibrate from my picks…, Reset to default, and Manage presets… (rename, duplicate, delete, import, and export your presets — its Edit opens the Adjust scoring panel on that preset). Two more things live here. Cull view & scoring source decides, for RAW+JPEG pairs, whether BurstPick scores and shows you the RAW preview (the default) or the Camera JPEG — pick the camera JPEG if you want the look your camera baked in. It only becomes selectable once the open folder actually contains pairs, changing it re-scans the folder, and either way it's the RAW that gets exported. Below that, Scope & limitations is a short, plain-language statement of what BurstPick is tuned for and where it's weaker — that it's a fast culler rather than a catalog, which sensor makes its noise scoring is calibrated for, that the bird eye model is newer than the mammal one and can miss on a hard flight frame, and that composition is partly taste (with calibration as the fix). It's the same text the first-run wizard offers, kept here so you can re-read it later.
• Viewing — the default grid query for new folders (frames, status, and both sort axes), double-click behavior, and focus-peaking mode, opacity, and dimming. The peaking mode you set here applies for the current session and starts off again at the next launch (see The lightbox); the opacity and dimming choices are remembered between launches. Reset focus peaking when returning to the grid is here too, off by default: turn it on and closing the lightbox, Compare, or burst review back down to the grid turns peaking off, so it never carries into a burst you didn't mean to dim.
• Export — quick-export mode and auto-flag, what happens to a burst after you export its best frame, full-export size and score-prefix, the Lightroom / XMP options (sidecar writing, overwriting, and the Sidecar filename convention), Score Keywords (see Score keywords), and your external editors. Automatically recover unaccounted exported files without asking is here too: when a scan finds files sitting in Picks/ or Rejects/ that the session doesn't know about, BurstPick normally asks before pulling them back in. Ticking this (or pressing Always recover on that prompt) makes it happen silently — you still get a toast saying what was recovered. It's off by default, and this checkbox is where you turn it back off.
• Storage — thumbnail cache usage and size limit (default 10 GB), with buttons to clear cached high-res decodes or the whole cache. Deleting photos now reclaims their cached images automatically, so Clean up is for genuine leftovers rather than routine housekeeping — you don't need to run it after a culling session to get your space back. It also no longer counts the cached images of photos you moved to Picks or Rejects as leftovers, so the figure it shows is honest and it only removes what nothing is using.
• Shortcuts — a complete read-only list of every keyboard shortcut.
• Advanced — anonymous crash reporting and the scoring-diagnostics overlay toolbar in the Lightbox (bbox, saliency, eye, focus, and noise — generated on demand, no scan-time cost).

Keyboard shortcuts

Reviewing (grid and lightbox):

P, X, U, and 1–5 act on your whole selection. One item selected toggles; two or more set (see Acting on a whole selection).

Managing bursts (grid):

Lightbox & burst review:

Comparing frames:

Export:

Sessions & data

Everything you do — picks, rejects, overrides, representatives, and view settings — saves automatically per folder, so quitting and reopening loses nothing. If photos were added or removed outside BurstPick since your last visit, it reconciles when the folder opens — surfacing new frames and flagging missing ones rather than silently discarding them (see Live updates).

Thumbnails and decoded previews are cached to keep browsing fast. Manage that cache, including a size limit and clear buttons, in Settings → Storage.

Right-click any photo for more: reveal it in your file manager, open it in an editor, copy its path, re-score it, compare its burst, write an XMP sidecar, or move it to Trash.

Reporting a problem. Help → About BurstPick → Export Diagnostics saves a zip you can send along with a bug report. It gathers your settings, your saved sessions, and the app's logs, and it now also includes a short record of recent zoom and tier activity — which version of a photo was on screen, when a sharper one swapped in, and whether it stalled. That is the part that used to vanish the moment you closed the app, so a zoom or sharpness problem was almost impossible to look into after the fact. File paths in the bundle are redacted.