01Why a burst needs a decision, not a look
Ten frames of the same moment are nine decisions you should not have to make by eye. The differences between them are a fraction of a pixel of motion blur, a focus point that landed on an ear instead of an eye, or a highlight that clipped as the light changed. At full screen they look the same; at 100% one of them is clearly better. Doing that comparison by hand is what turns a two-hour cull into five.
This tool does the mechanical part of that comparison. It finds the frames that belong to one moment, measures how much fine detail each one holds, and puts the sharpest first, so the only decision left is whether you like the moment at all.
02How the sharpness score works
Each frame is shrunk to a fixed working size and split into a grid. In every tile the tool measures the variance of the Laplacian, a standard measure of edge detail: crisp edges give a high number, blur gives a low one. The frame's score comes from its sharpest tiles rather than the whole picture, so a portrait shot wide open, which is mostly soft background on purpose, is judged on the subject.
The score is divided by the frame's overall brightness, so a brighter frame of the same moment does not look sharper than a darker one. Inside a burst the comparison is like for like, so it is strict: a frame well short of the moment's sharpest is marked soft. Between different scenes it is deliberately cautious, because a misty landscape holds far less fine detail than a street scene without being out of focus; only plainly blurred frames are called out there. A moment where every frame is soft keeps nothing, because there is no good version of it to keep.
03RAW files, without a RAW converter
Almost every camera stores a full-size JPEG preview inside its RAW files; it is what you see on the camera's screen. The tool reads that preview directly from the file, which is quick and needs no RAW decoder. It is the right basis for judging focus and motion blur. It is not a basis for judging how much you can recover from a shadow, so the exposure flags here are a warning, not a verdict.
04Frequently asked questions
No. Your browser reads the files and does all the analysis on your own computer. Nothing is sent to a server and nothing is stored. You can disconnect from the internet after the page loads and it still works.
Yes, through the full-size JPEG preview almost every camera embeds (NEF, ARW, CR2, CR3, DNG, RAF, ORF, RW2 and others). A RAW without an embedded preview is skipped and listed.
Eyes, faces, expressions and composition. The imagic desktop app checks eyes and faces, works on whole cards of RAW files, and then edits and exports the keepers or hands them to Lightroom.
Copy the file names or download keepers.txt, then select those files in your file manager or editor. The CSV has every frame's scores if you want to sort them yourself.
Up to 400 per run, which keeps a typical laptop responsive. Run a bigger shoot a folder at a time.