Built by a photographer who got sick of culling

Vantage exists because I kept losing evenings to the same job. I shoot motorsport and classic cars, and every shoot ended the same way: several hundred frames of the same car from the same angles, and me at a laptop deciding which of the eight near-identical versions had the cleanest reflection.

I’m Harry Moores. I run Harry Moores Media, photographing cars — classics, motorsport, dealership and private work — along with property and aerial jobs. Vantage is software I built for my own workflow first, and then made available because the problem clearly isn’t just mine.

Why it’s automotive-first

Almost every AI culling tool on the market was trained on weddings. That’s a sensible commercial decision — it’s the biggest market — but it means the models are experts at things that don’t exist in a car photograph. Blink detection is no use to me. Smile detection is no use to me.

What I need judged is whether the badge is sharp while the gravel isn’t, whether this is the frame where nothing ugly is reflected in the door, whether eight frames are really the same angle, and whether there’s a number plate in shot that needs to disappear before the client posts it publicly.

So Vantage learned on car work — a great deal of it mine, from circuits and classic-car jobs. That’s the honest reason it does automotive well and why weddings and portraits are at an earlier stage in it.

What I’ll tell you straight

• It’s in beta. Said on the homepage, said in the app on first launch, said here. There are rough edges and you will find some.
• Automotive is where it’s strongest. Other genres work and are labelled as earlier-stage in the app rather than dressed up.
• It doesn’t replace your judgement. It does the mechanical eighty per cent so the decisions left are the ones needing taste.
• Your photos stay yours. Culling runs on your machine. Nothing is uploaded unless you choose cloud backup or publish a gallery, and your photos are never used to train anything.
• If it gets something wrong, tell me. Support is me. That isn’t a slogan, it’s a headcount.

Writing

I write up the workflow side of the job in the Vantage Journal — culling motorsport and car shoots, dealership listings, property and drone work. It’s the practical stuff I’d have wanted when I started, and it’s written from shoots I’ve actually done rather than from a keyword list.