If you’re spending six or more hours editing a newborn session, the problem probably isn’t your editing. It’s that culling newborn photos never really happened — at least not the way it should have. You kept too many frames, told yourself the client might want options, and then sat down to edit a gallery that was twic (if not 4-5x) as big as it needed to be. That’s not generosity. That’s unpaid overtime.
Culling is the step most photographers treat as an afterthought. It turns out it’s the one that determines everything that comes after it.
What Culling Newborn Photos Actually Is — and What It Isn’t
For photographers newer to the industry, culling just means sorting through your images after a session and choosing which ones make it to the editing stage. But the mindset behind how you do it matters more than most people realize.
Culling isn’t picking your favorites. It’s eliminating everything that doesn’t earn its place in a client gallery.
That’s a different question than “do I love this image?” The question you’re actually asking is: “does this image add something that isn’t already here?” If the answer is no — if it’s slightly soft, if the expression isn’t quite right, if you already have a stronger version of this exact moment — it goes. Not into a maybe pile. Out.
Why Most Photographers Cull Too Generously — and What to Do Instead
There’s a fear that lives underneath a generous cull: what if I leave something out that the client would have loved?
It’s understandable. But more images doesn’t feel like more value to a client sitting at an ordering appointment. It feels like homework. They get overwhelmed, they second-guess themselves, and they struggle to choose — not because the images aren’t good, but because there are too many of them and too many are too similar.
Here’s my personal rule of thumb: I want to put roughly twice as many images into the gallery as I actually want them to pick.Our largest collection at Glean & Co has 30 images, and clients can add as many additional images as they want on top of that for an additional per image price. So I’m aiming to put about 80 images into the ordering gallery, which typically leaves families with around 35-40 favorites after their first pass through.
Then I ask them if they know which collection they’re thinking about, remind them of the options and pricing, and say something like: “Our largest collection has 30 images and you currently have 38 favorites. You could do all 38 and it would be $X, or we could work on getting it down to the 30-image collection or if you think you can take out 20 more, even the 18-image one. What would you like to do?”
Here’s what almost always happens: most families feel like they’ve already given up so much just getting to 38. The idea of cutting more is genuinely painful. They’ve already eliminated more than half of what they saw — how could they possibly take out more? That feeling almost always lands them in our top collection, not because I pushed them there, but because the psychology of loss does the work for me.
Now — those 80 images aren’t duplicates. They’re outtakes, and there’s an important difference. You might have two images from the same angle where mom is smiling down at the baby in one and looking at the camera in the other. They’re both good. A client with a generous budget might take both, but most won’t — they’re too similar to justify keeping both when there are other images competing for spots. So they pick one and move on. Then they get to the next two: a baby sleeping soundly and a baby mid-yawn with the biggest open mouth you’ve ever seen. Maybe they take both of those and skip the next two entirely. That’s the point. They’re making choices between genuinely different moments, not between five frames of the same pose where the only difference is a slightly different hand position.
In order for the ordering experience to work the way it should, those 80 images all need to earn their place. That’s the cull.
The Real Cost of a Bad Cull
Here’s the math nobody wants to do but everybody should. Let’s assume for a second that you edit the images entirely before you show them to your client for purchase. (Or alternatively, you’re an all-inclusive photographer paid one price for everything with no opportunity for upsell)
Say you edit 10 extra images per session that never needed to be there — outtakes, near-duplicates, frames that were fine but not your best. If each image takes 8 minutes to edit, that’s 80 minutes of editing time per session you didn’t need to spend. Multiply that by the number of sessions you shoot in a month. Then think about what your time is actually worth.
Now let’s take the same scenario but lets say you’re like me and only softproof your images instead of editing them all the way prior to the clients seeing them. But instead of showing the client 80 images and spending an hour during their ordering appointment, you showed them 200 images. They left 2 hours in to the appointment without making an order because they were overwhelmed and decided they needed to come back a second time to finalize their order. Now you’ve spent an extra hour in the ordering appointment AND have to set up a second appointment with them. You’ve not only lost that extra time, you’ve also lost the emotional excitement behind the sale. Likely when they come back they’ll be buying a smaller package.
A generous cull isn’t kindness to the client. It’s unpaid work for you and a harder ordering experience for them. If you’re consistently struggling with excessive editing hours, there’s a real chance you don’t have an editing problem. You have a culling problem.
The photographers who are actually profitable on their editing time are the ones who have learned to be ruthless in the cull — not because they care less about their clients, but because they understand that fewer, stronger images is the better product for everyone.
What Good Culling Newborn Photos Actually Looks Like
A solid cull runs four criteria for every image:
Technical: Is it sharp where it needs to be sharp? Is the exposure recoverable — meaning, is it so dark you’ve lost all the shadow detail, or so overexposed the highlights are completely blown out with nothing left to bring back? If the answer to either is no, it’s gone regardless of how much you love the moment.
Variety: Does this image actually add something different to the gallery, or is it just a tighter crop of the same shot? A vertical versus a horizontal of the exact same moment? If the only thing that changed was how close you were standing or which way you held the camera, you don’t need both. Pick the stronger one and let the other go. You should be able to see a clear difference in the photo, not feel like you’re at the Optometrist getting your eyes checked.
Near-duplicates: This is different from variety — this is where you have multiple frames of the same moment where something small shifted between them. A slightly different expression, a hand that moved, eyes that were almost open. It feels significant when you’re zoomed in at 100% right after a shoot. It is not significant to your client. You’re the only one who will ever notice the difference between frame 47 and frame 52. Pick the strongest one, let the others go, and move on. This is where most photographers hemorrhage editing time without realizing it — not on wildly different images but on the subtle variations between frames that are, for all practical purposes, the same photograph.
A Two-Pass Strategy If You Struggle to Let Images Go
Some photographers genuinely struggle to cull decisively and there’s no shame in that — especially when you’re emotionally fresh from a session you loved. If that’s you, try this:
Do a first pass and flag everything you’d consider keeping. Don’t be precious about it — just pull anything that might make the cut. Then walk away. Give yourself a few hours or come back the next morning.
When you return, treat that smaller flagged set like it’s your starting gallery and cull it again as if it’s the first round. You’ll find it’s much easier to be decisive on a set of 200 than a set of 2000. And if you’re stuck between two near-identical frames with slightly different expressions — pick one and move on. You do not need both. Neither does the client.
One Exception: The Sneak Peek
In the last post we talked about how culling newborn photos should happen before you edit anything — with one exception. If you have a standout image that’s obvious from the moment you load the card, pulling it for a sneak peek before you’ve done your full cull is completely fine.
The key is not letting that one edit derail the rest of your process. Edit your sneak peek, post it, and then put it down and cull the full session properly before you touch anything else. We’ll talk more down the line about how to make sure a one-off sneak peek edit stays consistent with the rest of the gallery once you get there.
When to Cull and What to Use
There’s no universally right answer on timing. Some photographers cull immediately after a session while the shoot is fresh in their mind and they can remember which moments were genuinely special versus which ones just look similar on a small screen. Others find they over-keep when they’re emotionally close to the session and prefer to wait a day.
The right answer is whichever approach results in a tighter, more confident cull. If you’re consistently keeping too many images, experiment with the other timing and see if it changes anything.
For tools: Lightroom’s flagging system works perfectly well and keeps everything in one place. Dedicated culling software like Photo Mechanic is faster if you’re shooting high volume and the speed of image loading is slowing you down. Either works. The tool matters less than the discipline you bring to using it.
One more thing worth addressing because it comes up constantly: AI culling. Programs like Aftershoot, Narrative, and Evoto all have culling features now, and the promise is appealing — let the computer do the tedious part so you can focus on the creative work.
Here’s my honest take: they’re just not there yet. And beyond the technical limitations, there’s a bigger philosophical issue for me — your eye is your art. The way you choose images is part of what makes your work yours. A computer can identify a sharp image with a good expression, but it can’t know that the slightly softer frame where mom’s eyes are closed is the one that’s going to make her cry when she sees it. That judgment is yours.
And this might actually be the core of the problem with AI culling and newborn photography specifically. Every other genre of photography is training these programs to flag closed eyes as a reject. Blink during a family portrait? Gone. Eyes half closed at a wedding? Trash. But in newborn photography we are often looking for exactly that — a mother’s eyes closed as she breathes in her baby for the first time, a dad with his eyes shut tight because he’s trying not to cry, a sleeping newborn with the longest eyelashes you’ve ever seen. The things AI culling is built to eliminate are sometimes the very things we’re trying to keep. That’s not a small calibration issue. That’s a fundamental mismatch between what the program is trained to look for and what makes a newborn gallery extraordinary.
Every six months or so I download one or two of these programs and give them another shot because I genuinely don’t want to be the person who misses something useful out of stubbornness. And every time, they just don’t do it for me. Maybe they pick differently than I do. Maybe I’m too particular. But if you want to talk about a real time suck — it’s me and an AI culling program. Because my trust in the output is so low that I end up going back through everything the program selected anyway, second-guessing every decision it made, and ultimately spending five times longer than if I’d just sat down and culled it myself from the beginning.
What This Means for Boise Families
If you’ve booked a session with Glean & Co, here’s what a good cull means for you: you’re not going to sit down at your ordering appointment and wade through 300 images trying to find the ones you actually love. You’re going to see a curated set of the strongest images from your session — the ones that were sharp, well-lit, and genuinely captured something worth keeping.
That’s what you should expect from any professional photographer. A well-culled gallery is a gift. It respects your time, makes your decisions easier, and means that whatever you choose is actually going to be something worth putting on your wall.
Want to Get Your Editing Process Dialed In?
I’m Paige McLeod — photographer for over 25 years, newborn specialist for close to a decade, and professional photo editor for almost 20. I teach the editing and business side of newborn photography through Editing for Newborn Photographers and the Newborn Photography Editing Academy.
If you’re a photographer who wants to actually understand your workflow — not just edit faster but edit smarter — that’s exactly what those courses are built around. And if you’re a Boise family looking to book a session, you can find us at gleanandco.com
Up next: How to build consistency into your newborn gallery from the very first image.
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