Lightning-fast image culling and cataloging for macOS. Fly through a fresh card the moment it mounts. Rate, tag, and reject. Organize your photos into sets. Never lose track of a file, no matter which drive it migrates to.
Apple Silicon · macOS 14+ · Signed & notarized · No account required. Shrike Cloud is invite-only for now.
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★★★★★ The how
Processing stays in the program you already use. (Shrike stays out of the darkroom.)
Card to disk in one hop, every byte checksum-verified as it lands.
Rate, reject, and compare at keyboard speed. The selects fall out.
Develop the RAWs in Lightroom, Capture One, Photoshop, whatever you prefer. Shrike stays out of the darkroom.
Projects, sessions, sets. Files stay found no matter which drive they migrate to.
Hand off a polished web gallery straight from your sets. The client sees the finished work.
Three moves and you're working
Cull at full speed, keep every shoot organized, and hand off finished work. Two versions: solo out of the box, and when the whole studio needs in, Shrike Cloud is the way (by invitation for now). A murmuration, if you will.
Shrike browses the previews your camera already rendered, so a fresh card opens instantly and scrolling never stutters. Rate with 1–5, reject with a keystroke, auto-advance to the next frame. Zoom into the loupe when it matters. Faithful rendering, a histogram, clipping warnings, and a compare view for when two frames are fighting for the same spot.
It's a hierarchy: projects hold sessions, sessions hold sets, and sets can mix photos from any folder on any drive. Photos are identified by what they are, not where they sit on your drives. When you move files to an archive drive or the studio NAS, the catalog just keeps up. Offline drive? Browse via the cache, and when you're off the plane, all of your changes sync back up.
Batch rename with tokens ({seq} {date} {camera} {orig}), shift capture times across a multi-camera shoot, create multiple sets from the same session, and track alternative file names within a delivery.
"The shrike is a songbird that hunts: it selects its catches and keeps them pinned where it can find them again. That is the whole app."
The About panel, telling the truth
Under the feathers
First look at a 5,000-photo folder in under a second; scrolling stays butter-smooth at 10,000. The focus is on the photography rather than the software (even though we really love the software).
Every decision is a keystroke: 1–5 to rate, letters to tag or reject, Z for the loupe, S to add the image to a set, and so on. Don't like our keymap? Set your own.
One hop from card to destination, with every byte checksum-verified as it lands.
Your catalog lives whole on your Mac. Solo mode is the default: no server, no account, no connection required. Call it airplane-mode editing.
When you're ready to share, Shrike Cloud keeps one catalog in sync for the whole team. Everyone works the same shoot without stepping on each other, and you can see who's working where in real time.
A built-in MCP server lets your AI agent work within your catalog: build sets, tag keywords, and find files across your drives. Connect an assistant when you want a hand.
Add the photos in this client list to a set called “Client Favorites.” AI, in its place
AI belongs in the busywork: organizing shoots, keeping track of contacts, and making sense of your workflows. Point Claude at a drive full of photos and ask it to build out your Shrike catalog automatically: organizing years of shoots into projects, sessions, and sets. Or start small: turn a client's list into a set. Spend less time keeping everything straight. Your selects, your edits, your eye: the creative decisions stay yours. It's opt-in, and Shrike works without it.
"Organizing my photography is the perfect use-case for AI. I don't want it to retouch portraits, but I do want it to logically index 350,000 images on my drives automatically."
The numbers
The beta shipping weekly (at least). Apple Silicon, macOS 14 Sonoma or later. No account required; Shrike Cloud is invite-only for now. Signed, notarized, and auto-updating.
Shrike is brought to you by a photographer and problem-solving software engineer, and a bag of dill chips. Have questions, bug reports, a workflow we should support? Write in.