What Minkrop is, and how it started

Minkrop is an app for sports photographers: it culls the bursts, crops on the action and straightens the horizon, then sends the photos to Lightroom. It was built by a photographer who once had 20,000 frames to edit in two days. Silviu Butnarașu tells how it got here.

From the pitch to behind the camera

Silviu was an athlete first, then got hooked on photography. Sports photography brought the two together.

"The first thing I shot was football, because it's common and easy to find here in Romania. But something lit up when I photographed the men's Romanian Volleyball Cup, in January 2025. I'd been doing sports photography for only a few months, and all those frames and top-level athletes gave me real emotion and some spectacular moments."

Since then he has moved from a Nikon D500 to a Z8, for speed and image quality, and taken more than 1.4 million photos in just over two years. Most of them come from tournaments with dozens of matches in a single weekend.

The work after the match

For him, one match means 1,500 to 3,000 frames, shot at 12 frames per second. He delivers around 20 to 30% of them. Editing happens a day or two after the match and takes one to three hours per match.

"At amateur matches I shoot more, because I want every player to have something to remember the match by. At professional ones I shoot less, but the moments are more spectacular."

Picking the photos isn't the biggest problem: he does it on the camera, in a few minutes, even if it gets tiring after several matches. The hard part comes next.

"The biggest headache is cropping and straightening. Today's tools are slow, so that's what takes me the longest. And it matters: a moment you've caught stands out with the right crop and a level horizon, even subtle ones. That's the difference between an amateur photo and a professional one."

The week with 20,000 photos

About two months ago came a week with 14 amateur matches and 2 professional ones: close to 20,000 photos to edit in two days.

"I thought I was going to lose my mind. I started asking myself why I'd chosen to do this, and whether there was an easier way. I looked for solutions online and found nothing that would help me, not replace what I do by hand."

So he built one himself. After a few days of research, the first version was ready in two days. He used it, got ideas, improved it. Then he gave it to a photographer friend who works with twice his volume.

"After using it, he told me he'd been searching online for a solution for over a year and hadn't found one. That's when I decided to polish the tool and pass it on. It's a solution for photographers, not a replacement."

A photographer and a friend

Minkrop is made by two people. Cosmin Braniște has been Silviu's friend for years and takes care of Minkrop's image and marketing, strategy, sales, feedback and technical support.

"Without him I wouldn't have launched the project. I still tend to think it isn't good enough."

What Minkrop does, and what it doesn't

From all the crops and straightening he did by hand on those 1.4 million photos, Silviu drew general rules for straightening, cropping and sorting. General on purpose: enough to speed up the edit, without forcing his style on other photographers.

"Minkrop doesn't replace the photographer. It helps you be faster and not spend hours in front of a screen. The app analyses the photos and, if you want, picks them too. If you don't, it just crops and straightens the ones you picked. The difference from other apps is that Minkrop doesn't try to guess or to learn your style. It just helps you finish sooner."

Everything runs locally, on your own computer: it works anywhere, uses the full power of your machine, and your photos go nowhere. The originals are never touched, and the results reach Lightroom as new files. Measured on Silviu's computer, with an RTX 3060 graphics card, 2,000 RAW photos are analysed, cropped and straightened in 1 minute 47 seconds.

The name? It comes from "minimal" and "crop", though Silviu says it's more of a generic name than one with a particular meaning.

What comes next

The plan isn't for a year from now, but for the coming months.

"I want Minkrop to replace the slow tools. I want the final product to leave straight from Minkrop, to a cloud space where clients download their photos as soon as they're ready."

The first step is editing with presets inside the app, with a final JPEG export. Then comes the cloud gallery, for delivering to clubs, parents and the press. Both are on the roadmap.

And to a sports photographer sitting right now with 3,000 frames on the card and a whole evening ahead, Silviu says it simply:

"Try Minkrop. Instead of hours of editing, you'll have time left for a film or a series."

Minkrop comes with a 15-day free trial, no card needed.