Pre- Lightroom photo processing

Much as I like Lightroom, and Aperture (RIP), I have found that with the ever-increasing number of images, and their size, I need to do more about culling/picking and preprocessing. It's not a huge deal, but there are some tools that are emerging that seem to make my work easier if I do it outside of Lr.

An example is using a compare tool. I have lots of pairs of images, as when I do a lens correction in DxO and have a RAW done by Lr. I want to quickly move in compare mode, but Lr doesn't do pair-by-pair. And ditto for sets of bracketed photos, either traditional exposure variation or HDR or focus stacking sets. I can arrive at some of that by filtering, etc, but that slows things down.

Another example is quick culling before import by some sort of metadata criteria. I often get other people's SD cards and need to import files with certain criteria. It's easy to ADD stuff to files upon import to Lr, but difficult to do much besides look at a blurry image when deciding what to pull in.

So enter the contenders. It seems to be a hot field right now.

Snapselect: free right now in MAS; demo available.

Perfect Browse 9.5: free through a promo; https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1881311/

PhotoSweeper: $10US, demo available

FastRawViewer: on sale for $15US, demo available

I like Snapselect and PhotoSweeper because both can show dicrete sets of photos by time gap in a visual grid; that usually clumps up my brackets. I'd say Snapselect is faster, but PhotoSweeper has that pairs comparison I lust for, and shows metadata. Both can look for dupes, which is useful for culling, and Snapselect is particularly good at that. And both can work with Lr, sending the reject info back to Lr as a collection of rejects. Very cool.

Perfect Browse is a nice browser, but doesn't have the views of the first two. But it can do more, and directly edit metadata. It integrates less with Lr, but you can just edit metadata right in it, and the changes get saved to XMP for Lr to pick up on import or synchronization.

FastRawViewer is what it says. It's rather unique and is a tool for the more sophisticated photographer. You can not only select photos based on viewing the histogram or focus peaking, but add exposure adjustments, ratings, etc. It's pretty amazing, and can work for JPEGs as well.

Another I have considered but haven't used yet is Photo Mechanic, which of course is the ingester of choice for journalists and others who need to mess with a lot of metadata info.

Anyone have other suggestions for tools or workflows?

Generally any civilized photo application will write sidecars for RAW files, unless you use DNG. It is a Bad Thing to write into RAW files without permission, but sometimes you need to (shifting creation time being the most common, but I've had to do it with lens info, and sometimes GPS). And they aren't a variety usually, just standardized XMP files. Metadata can get written directly into DNG or JPEG or TIFF.

Thus if you use non-RAW it wouldn't be generating sidecars, but most will by default if you DO use RAW. Not much choice. The same is true for geoencoding applications or most anything that changes the metadata, since that's the only way to exchange it.