What the checklist covers
Culling takes longer than it should when the order keeps changing: a frame gets a second look for sharpness, then again for expression, then a third time because you forgot whether it was a duplicate. The checklist fixes the order once and keeps it the same every time.
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Sort by capture time, not filename
Bursts and near-duplicates sit next to each other, so you compare them once instead of hunting for the other half of a pair later.
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Kill the technical failures first
Missed focus, motion blur, closed eyes mid-burst, blown highlights with nothing to recover. Reject on sight, no second-guessing: a technical failure never becomes a keeper no matter how good the moment was.
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Pick one frame per burst
Inside a burst, decide on sharpness and peak expression together, in one pass. Mark the winner, reject the rest of that burst immediately so it never gets reconsidered.
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Flag near-duplicates across the set
Two frames from different moments that ended up looking almost the same. Keep the stronger one, reject the other, and do not keep both "just in case."
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Second pass: color and composition only
Everything left survived the technical cut. Now judge composition, color and whether it earns a place in the final set, not whether it is in focus.
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Star or flag the top picks
Mark the best of the best separately from "keep." This is the set a client or a feed actually sees first.
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Export and archive, same session
Export the keepers and back up the full card before you move on. A cull that never gets exported is not finished, it is postponed.
Why the order matters
Most of the time lost in culling is not spent deciding, it is spent re-deciding: re-opening a frame you already looked at because the editing pass caught something the culling pass should have caught first. Separating "is this technically good enough to keep" from "is this the photo I want to use" into two distinct passes, in that order, is the single habit that saves the most time, with or without software helping you.
Doing this with imagic
This exact routine is what imagic automates: it scores every frame for sharpness and groups bursts and near-duplicates for you, so steps one through four above take a few minutes instead of an hour on a full card. Try a free trial, or keep using the checklist by hand with whatever you already have open.