What Is imagic?
imagic is a free, open-source AI photo culling and editing tool released under the MIT licence. It automates the most time-consuming part of photo post-processing: sorting through hundreds or thousands of images to find your best shots. imagic uses artificial intelligence to score every photo for sharpness, exposure, noise, composition, and detail, and automatically groups near-duplicate and burst frames.
imagic works on Windows, macOS, and Linux and supports all major RAW formats including CR2, CR3, NEF, ARW, RAF, ORF, RW2, DNG, PEF, plus JPEG, PNG, and TIFF. The desktop app is available for a one-time payment of $10 with no subscription.
Step 1: Install imagic
imagic installs via Python's package manager. Open your terminal and run:
pip install imagic
Python 3.8 or later is required. Once installed, confirm the installation worked by running imagic --version in your terminal.
Step 2: Import Your Photos
The first step in imagic's workflow is Import. Point imagic at the folder containing your photos: a folder of RAW files copied from your camera card, or any folder of images you want to cull. imagic reads your files in place and does not move or copy them without your instruction. Your originals stay exactly where they are.
Step 3: Analyse
The Analyse step is where the AI does its work. imagic processes every image in your imported folder, scores each for sharpness, exposure, noise, composition, and detail, groups near-duplicate and burst frames using perceptual hashing, and pre-selects the highest-quality image from each burst group. For a 1,000-image shoot, the Analyse step typically takes 5 to 15 minutes. You can step away while it runs.
Step 4: Review
The Review step presents imagic's analysis results for your manual confirmation. You will see individual image scores for each quality dimension, burst groups with the AI-recommended best frame highlighted, and an overall quality ranking. Go through the results and confirm, override, or reject the AI's pre-selections. This is where your creative judgement applies: the AI handles technical quality assessment, you make the final editorial decisions.
Step 5: Cull and Export
The Cull step confirms your selections and separates selects from rejects. Your selects can be copied to a dedicated Selects folder, sent to RawTherapee for processing, or prepared for batch export. The Export step handles batch output to JPEG, TIFF, or PNG at your specified resolution and quality settings. Configure your export preset once and apply it to every future shoot.
Next Steps
After your first session, explore imagic's settings to adjust quality score thresholds, configure export presets, and set up RawTherapee integration. The five-step workflow is consistent for every shoot size from 50 images to 5,000.