Get your shoot off the card, verified, and cut down to the keepers — on your Mac, offline, for one payment. No subscription, no cloud, no account.
FirstPass is the fast, buy-once photo ingest and culling tool for Mac. Pull thousands of frames off
your cards, verify every copy before the card leaves the reader, make your first-pass selects in
minutes, and hand only your keepers to your editor — all on your own machine, with no subscription
and no cloud.
Written by a photographer for photographers, FirstPass keeps the interface clean and puts the
decisions that matter — sharp or soft, keep or cut — front and centre.
INGEST
• Download from several cards or cameras at once, to two destinations in the same pass
• Fast mode copies straight off a mounted card; Automatic mode drives any camera over PTP
• Start automatically the moment a card is connected
• Works with shared devices to pull images over a network
• Build folders automatically from each file's own EXIF capture date, camera make and model
• Bulk-rename on the way in with date, sequence, camera and original-name tokens
• Download the whole card or just your selection, with the file count on the button
• Keep browsing while a card copies — progress stays in the sidebar, and each card can be
cancelled on its own
VERIFY EVERY COPY
• Checksum verification compares a content hash of the source against every copy written, per file,
before the card is released — a plain file copy assumes it worked, FirstPass checks
• Or verify by size for a fast sanity check
• Files that fail are re-copied automatically; anything still failing is reported, never counted as
a success — a destination that cannot be written to is named, before copying starts
• Cancel a transfer and FirstPass tells you exactly how much had been copied
• Write a transfer report for the job: CSV manifest, PDF report, or ASC MHL media hash list
• Cards are browsed read-only — nothing is written back to your card
CULL FAST
• Compare near-identical frames side by side with synchronised zoom and pan — inspect the same detail
in every shot at once and keep the sharpest (up to 16 at once, as many as your display suits)
• Unlock one frame to line it up by hand when two shots were framed slightly differently, then lock
again and keep the alignment
• Rate 0–5 stars and mark images with nine customisable colour flags (⌘1–⌘9), from the Photo menu,
a right-click or the keyboard
• A rating or flag set in one window appears in every window showing that folder
• Filter the gallery instantly by rating
• Compact browser mode hides the chrome so photos fill the window; optional uniform-landscape layout
• Fit, full-screen and true 100% views; histogram and a full image-info inspector
• Multi-select with the keyboard or mouse; sort by date, name or rating
• Browse a folder together with its sub-folders — thousands of RAW files to a folder
• Thumbnail memory is yours to set, and sized to your Mac by default
• Pin the folders you use most for one-click access
• Play a slideshow of a folder or your selects, with your choice of transition
FINISH
• Rename in place, delete to the Trash, and open in your external editor
• Moving or deleting a large number of photographs asks first — you set the number, and 0 asks
every time
• Dragging follows the Finder: ⌥ copies, ⌘ moves, and photographs move within a disk and copy
between disks
• Export as the original file, or re-encode to JPEG, PNG, HEIC, TIFF or PDF, with a quality setting
for JPEG and HEIC
• Re-encoding can embed the star rating as standard XMP, so Lightroom, Bridge and Photo Mechanic
read it
• Drag images straight out to a folder or the Finder
• Reveal any file in the Finder
WHY FIRSTPASS
• Buy once. No subscription, ever.
• 100% offline — your images never leave your Mac, and are never used to train anything
• Non-destructive: originals are never rewritten, deletes go to the Trash
• Universal Binary, native on Apple silicon
• The gallery, the image inspector and the colour flags work with VoiceOver and from the keyboard
• Supports RAW files from all major cameras
REQUIREMENTS
• macOS 14.6 or later
This app hasn’t received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview.
Hangs as soon as I open a folder with lots of pictures
WantsRBT1.2
Too bad - this app could have been just what I was looking for. But it hangs right away on Lion as soon as I double-click a picture.
Very nice, simple app - UPDATE
David@OC
All I wanted was the ability to find a simple, yet inteligent way to download photos from my camera to my iMac.This program does exactly that. While it does have ever more features, I have not used them.My only request would be to have the ability to delete the photos from the camera, after the download is completed, which it currently does not support.Other than that, good app and surely worth the money.UPDATE:I found two issues that are very annoying. While I am sure they can fix them - and strongly suggest that they do - is that the windows shows not only the files in the folder, but the files in all sub folders too, without letting you know. The second issue is it cannot sort properly. The file system puts 2 thru 99 BEFORE 100. So, if you have downloaded more than 100 pictures, it cannot sort properly, therefore, you cannot rename sequentially, in the order they were taken.
Slow, memory hog, buggy
rdouma
I bought this because I had to process 2800 images (10MP per piece). I was not looking forward to importing this in Aperture and doing my workflow there. This looked promising. However, it just garbles up all memory (I have a 2010 MBP with 8 GB RAM). It consumed > 4 Gb of RAM. Then, after 30 minutes or so, it crashed. Worst: it had not stored the ratings of the last 100 photos or so I reviewed. I would expect it to store ratings immediately, but I suspect it does it when you close the program. Which is not working if it crashes obviously. Don't know if the sheer volume of photos is causing the problem. Guess I'll use Aperture after all.
Not very polished, bit buggy, slow to refresh
Tom Lambotte
I was looking for a simple way to import my photos onto my Mac, without going directly into iPhoto > Photostream. I take tons of photos and I end up deleting tha majority of them, so having all of them uploaded automatically to Photostream is very frustrating. While this program works, I find the refresh rate to be very slow and it does not let me select and slide up or down. The menus are not very logical and it is just overall not the polished experience I am used to having on a Mac. If anyone has found something that does what I am looking for, please let me know!
macOS 27 support
Fixes an issue with sequence numbering when multiple similar cards are being downloaded simultaneously
Fixes an issue with tokens where it would use current date instead of exif date if destination used current date
Version 1.7.3
The developer, Bhupendra Yadav, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Linked to You
The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:
Contact Info
Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
