Severe freezing and lag when using new Assisted Culling with faces

Environments:

• Device 1: Mac Studio M1 Max (32GB RAM)

• OS 1: macOS 26.5.1

• Device 2: MacBook Pro 16 M4 Pro

• Application: Lightroom Classic

Description: The new Assisted Culling feature with faces is completely unusable. Navigating through images causes the entire application to hang repeatedly.

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Open Lightroom Classic.

2. Ensure Standard Previews are completely generated and AI Culling has finished analyzing the entire folder.

3. Verify no background tasks are running.

4. Start navigating through the images using the new Assisted Culling feature for faces.

Actual Behavior: After viewing a few images, the entire application freezes for 15-30 seconds. When it finally unfreezes, it rapidly skips forward by about 10 images. It works normally for a few more images before the severe freeze happens again.

Troubleshooting Steps Taken:

• Confirmed Standard Previews are fully generated.

• Confirmed AI Culling has completely finished analyzing the folder.

• Confirmed absolutely no background processes are running in Lightroom.

• Reset application settings/preferences.

• Completely reinstalled the application.

• Disabled and removed all plugins.

• Tested on a secondary machine (MacBook Pro 16 M4 Pro) - the exact same issue occurs.

Expected Behavior: Smooth navigation between images without UI freezes or skipped images.

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