Winnow – Photo Bursts for the macOS Photos App

The problem

Hold the shutter on a mirrorless or DSLR body and you get thirty frames of very nearly the same picture. Import them and the Photos app has no idea they belong together — it files them as thirty unrelated stills, scattered through your library.

Finding the one frame that nailed focus then means scrolling past twenty-nine that didn't, one at a time.

What Winnow does

Scans your Photos library and rebuilds those runs into bursts, using capture time.
Shows each burst as a filmstrip you can drag open as large as you like.
Zooms to actual size — one image pixel per screen pixel — and holds that magnification as you step through the burst, so you can watch one detail across every frame and see which is sharp.
Pins two frames side by side with synced pan and zoom, so you can compare candidates without flipping back and forth.
Marks a suggested Sharpest and Softer frame from the image content itself — birds, swimmers, portraits — as suggestions only, never auto-keep or auto-delete.
Deletes the frames you reject, either the ones you picked or everything you didn't mark to keep.
Remembers which bursts you have already been through, so you can work a shoot in sittings.

Your photos stay yours

Winnow makes no network connections of any kind. Nothing is uploaded, no analytics are collected, and there are no accounts. It reads your library, and it stores one small file recording which bursts you have reviewed.

Deleted frames go to Recently Deleted in Photos, where macOS keeps them recoverable for 30 days. Every deletion is confirmed by macOS itself.

$9.99 one-time on the Mac App Store. No subscription. Family Sharing. macOS 14 or later.

Get Winnow on the Mac App Store

Requirements

macOS 14 or later. Works with the Photos library you already have — no importing, no separate catalogue, no duplicate files.

Support

Questions, problems, or a burst that isn't being detected the way you expect: winnow@tansfom.com.

If a burst comes out split in two, or unrelated shots get lumped together, the grouping threshold is adjustable under Filters — and the in-app Help explains how to tune it.