Building the .shock Suite: tools that run our own shoots

Every commercial shoot ends the same way: thousands of frames, a deadline, and a pile of admin between the camera and the client. For years that pile ate days per project. So we stopped waiting for software that fit and built our own.

The .shock Suite is the set of tools we use to run our own production — released as browser apps anyone can use. It isn't a side project bolted onto a marketing site; it's the actual pipeline our shoots pass through, from first cull to final delivery.

The problem with the existing tools

Professional photo software is powerful and slow to learn, priced per seat, and assumes everything lives on one workstation. On a location shoot with a small crew and a tight turnaround, that model fights you. We wanted something that opened in a browser, worked without a connection, and didn't make us upload a client's unreleased campaign to someone else's cloud just to sort it.

What the Suite covers

cull — fast first-pass selection, keyboard-driven, on the original files.
edit & retouch — adjustments and clean-up in the browser.
tag — keywording and metadata, including batch AI-assisted tagging.
release & rights — model and property releases tracked against each asset.
publish & stats — delivery and a view of what's where.

Offline-first, originals stay on your disk

The single most important design decision: your raw files never have to leave your machine. The Suite uses the browser's own file-access and storage so the originals stay on your disk across sessions, and the apps keep working with no connection. A shoot in a basement studio or a desert location doesn't depend on the wifi.

One shared layer under every app

Because culling, tagging and releases all describe the same assets, the Suite apps share one data layer. Tag an image in one app and the release tracker already knows about it. Content is de-duplicated by a fingerprint of the file itself, so the same shot opened in two apps is one record, not two. That shared spine is what turns a set of tools into a pipeline.

Why we released it publicly

The honest answer is that software built for real production pressure is harder to break than software designed for a demo. If it holds up across a 20,000-image editorial cull in a hotel room with patchy wifi, it will hold up for anyone. Opening it to other photographers meant more edge cases, more feedback, more reasons to make it robust. The Suite runs our shoots; sharing it was the fastest path to making it better.

What comes next

The publish and delivery layer is the current focus: getting from a finalised, tagged, released set to a client-facing gallery or a platform submission in as few steps as possible. The data layer already knows what is tagged and released — the delivery step should be a button, not a project. That is what we are building toward.

Want to run your own shoots on it?

Explore the .shock Suite