PicSift: Find Your Best Photos

You decide what “best” means. PicSift rates every photo on six qualities, and each one is a point on a chart:

Drag a point with your finger and your whole set re-sorts in front of you.

The qualities are Overall Appeal, Sharpness, Lighting, Composition, Faces, and Subject. Pull a point outward and that quality counts for more, and you can combine them however you like. For a set full of people, pull Faces out. If strong framing matters too, add Composition to the mix, then a dash of Sharpness, and watch the order shift with each change. The ratings are already done, so you can keep tweaking and sift the results as you go. Open any photo to see how it rated on each quality.

If you’d rather not set six points yourself, use two sliders instead: Technical to Artistic, and People to Scenes. Each end is a ready-made blend of all six qualities. Technical leans on sharpness and lighting, Artistic on overall appeal and composition, People on faces, and Scenes on composition across the whole frame. Your photos re-sort as you slide, the same as with the chart.

Presets such as Portrait and Landscape start you from a mix based on published advice for that kind of photography. Smart Auto adjusts the mix photo by photo, so faces count for more in a portrait and composition in a landscape.

SIFTING ON IPAD

The deck takes you through a set best first, one full-width photo at a time, and you decide each one with a swipe of your finger. Pull a photo down to keep it, flick it up to let it go, and slide sideways to move along. Undo is always one tap away. Letting a photo go never deletes it; it just stops competing for your attention.

With a keyboard attached, the grid and the deck use the same keys as the Mac: P keeps, X rejects, Delete adds to the Delete Tray, ← and → move, and ⌘Z undoes.

When you’d rather see everything at once, the grid lays out the whole set best to worst.

Lock the iPad partway through a big set and scoring keeps going, with progress on the Lock Screen while you do something else.

PicSift CLEAR OUT THE REST

When you’re ready to let photos go, gather them in the Delete Tray: one at a time, all your rejects at once, or the duplicates you didn’t choose. Look them over, uncheck any you want to keep, and delete the rest together. Photos from your library go to Recently Deleted in the Photos app for 30 days, and with iCloud Photos they leave your other devices too.

WHY PICSIFT

Finding your best photos is hard because “best” is two judgments at once. Sharp focus and good light can be measured. Taste is harder, so PicSift draws on research where people rated large collections of photos to predict how people would rate yours. Your own taste comes in through the mix: as you adjust it, your photos reorder in front of you, and the shots worth posting from a trip or sending after a dinner party rise to the top.

PRIVATE BY DEFAULT

Scoring happens entirely on your iPad. PicSift needs no account, doesn’t track you, collects nothing, and sends nothing to us or anyone else. Your photos go only where you put them: your own Apple Photos library, or a folder.

PicSift MORE WHEN YOU NEED IT

– Visual Search: type “sunset at the beach” and find those shots without tagging anything first.
– People: group photos by face and name the regulars.
– Duplicates: spot near-identical shots, keep the best, and send the rest to the Delete Tray.
– Smart Albums: your best work, gathered automatically.
– Places: see where a set was taken, on a map.

BUILT ON OPEN RESEARCH

PicSift’s scoring is built on research that its authors published and shared openly. The app’s Model Library names and credits every model it uses, with links to the original papers and licenses.

ONE PURCHASE, MAC AND IPAD

No subscription, ever. Find, share, and clear out your shots for free; unlock unlimited photos per run and People browsing with a single one-time purchase that covers PicSift on your iPad and on your Mac, and shares with your Family Sharing group.