Where your RAW files live while you edit
Checked against CullTone on 18 Oct 2026.
At the end of a long shoot the whole job is on two or three small cards in a jacket pocket. A 24-megapixel camera writes about 24.6 MB per compressed RAW, so a full day of 3,000 frames is about 74 GB. Where those 74 GB sit for the next fortnight, and how many copies exist, matters more than any edit you'll make.
The first hour home
Before dinner, before the cull, before anything:
- Copy every card to your working drive.
- Copy every card again, to a second drive that isn't plugged into the same desk.
- Open a handful of files from each copy, from the start, middle and end of the card. A copy that never finished looks fine until you need it.
- Only then format the cards, and only in the camera.
Do this even when you're tired. Especially then. A card that's been formatted with the only good copy on a laptop that then falls off the back seat is a phone call to a couple nobody wants to make.
How long an upload takes
If you plan to send the RAWs anywhere, to a second editor, a backup service or an outsourced edit, the number that matters is your upload speed, not your download speed. Many home and studio connections upload far slower than they download, and the figure on the bill is usually the download one. Run a speed test and note the upload result.
| Upload speed | Time |
|---|---|
| 10 Mbps | about 16.4 hours |
| 20 Mbps | about 8.2 hours |
| 50 Mbps | about 3.3 hours |
| 100 Mbps | about 1.6 hours |
| 500 Mbps | about 20 minutes |
The working: 74 GB is 592,000 megabits; divide by your speed in megabits per second to get seconds. Real uploads run slower than the line rate, and slower again on a connection shared with a household streaming the match, so read the table as a best case. Your own cards will differ: compressed or uncompressed RAW, a 24- or 45-megapixel sensor and the number of frames all move the total, so multiply your own average file size by your own frame count.
At 20 Mbps, a full wedding is an overnight job, and a second shooter's cards double it. Start it before bed and check it in the morning.
Where CullTone keeps them
With CullTone the RAW files stay on your Mac, in the folders you copied them to. You cull and edit there, and what goes online is small: previews so you or a second editor can review on a phone, your decisions, and the finished JPEGs you deliver. The page on what leaves your Mac lists each one.
That has a cost worth saying out loud. The full-size files live on one computer, so anything that needs them, like rendering a changed edit or exporting a gallery, waits for that computer to be switched on. For a solo photographer that's the Mac they edit on anyway. For a team spread across cities it's a real constraint, covered on the small studios page.
No signal at the venue, or on the train home? CullTone Desktop can cull with no connection and sends your decisions once you're back online.
Who this doesn't suit yet
- You edit on Windows. CullTone Desktop runs on Macs with Apple silicon only, and there is no Windows build yet.
- Your team has no shared machine and each editor needs the full-size files on their own computer.
- Your cameras shoot something other than Sony ARW. Sony ARW is the best supported format in the beta; Canon, Nikon, Fujifilm and DNG files are read the same way.
As for speed: the work runs on your own Mac, so there is no upload to wait for before the cull starts. A bigger Mac gets through a big day sooner.
Nothing here is a backup
Not your editing app, not a gallery, not a sync folder that faithfully copies a deletion to every device. Two copies on two drives before you format the card, one of them away from your desk, kept for as long as your contract says. Then check the second drive actually opens.