FirstPass compared
A one-time purchase for getting the shoot off the card and cut down to the keepers
If you are looking for an alternative to Photo Mechanic
Photo Mechanic is the tool most photographers mean when they talk about fast ingest and culling, and it is good at it. People generally start looking for an alternative for one of three reasons: the price, the fact that it is another subscription to run alongside Lightroom, or simply that they want something smaller and native on the Mac.
FirstPass covers the same part of the job — copy off the card, sort it, rate it, throw most of it away — and hands the result to your editor of choice through XMP. It does not try to be a full asset manager, and it does not edit your photographs.
If you want to buy it once rather than rent it
Most of the newer culling tools are subscriptions, and several are cloud services that upload your images to rank them. FirstPass is neither.
One payment. $27.99 on the Mac App Store, US pricing. There is no subscription and no renewal.
Entirely offline. It makes no network connections at all. Your images are never uploaded and are never used to train anything — not as a policy that could change, but because the app has no code that talks to a network.
No account. Nothing to sign into, and nothing that stops working if a service is discontinued.
What it does that most of the category does not
Culling tools generally assume the files arrived intact. FirstPass treats getting them off the card as the part worth being careful about.
Every file is verified against the card before the card is released — a size check, or a full content checksum. Finder copies and assumes success.
Anything that fails is re-copied automatically, and anything still failing is reported rather than counted as a success.
Transfer reports as CSV manifests, PDF summaries and ASC MHL sidecars, for work that has to be handed on with proof it arrived complete.
Two destinations in the same pass, so a backup exists before the card leaves the reader.
What it is not
Not a RAW editor. It rates, flags and files; it does not develop. Ratings are written as XMP, so Lightroom, Bridge and Photo Mechanic read your work straight away.
Not a digital asset manager. There is no catalogue, no keyword hierarchy and no library to migrate into or out of. It works on folders.
Not an AI culler. It does not decide which photograph is best. It makes comparing similar frames fast enough that you can decide.
Mac only, and it needs macOS 14.6 or later.
$27.99 once — US pricing; Apple sets the price in other regions.