Community Manager

Question

(Early Access) Assisted Culling (LrClassic)

Forum|Forum|4 months ago
September 24, 2025
45 replies
63555 views

Introducing Assisted Culling (Early Access) in Lightroom Classic.

For providing feedback for Lightroom Desktop, click here.

We’re bringing Assisted Culling to Lightroom Classic as part of the MAX 2025 release! This AI-powered workflow helps you quickly narrow large photo sets to the best shots using objective signals.

What is Assisted Culling?
Assisted Culling is one of the most requested features from advanced photographers, consistently topping feedback at customer events. It streamlines the process of identifying top photo selects from large sets—hundreds or even thousands—based on attributes like eye openness, sharpness, and more.

Assisted Culling saves photographers countless hours of manual review, letting them focus on creativity instead of sorting.

Eyes Open – Detects whether subjects’ eyes are open.

Eye Focus – Measures the sharpness of the eyes.

Subject Focus – Evaluates overall clarity.

Clean Up – Identifies likely rejects (e.g., blurs, misfires, exposure issues).

Stacks – Groups images either by visual similarity or time for easier selection.

Why Early Access?
Assisted Culling launches as Early Access at MAX 2025 with a narrow, high-confidence scope prioritizing portraits and headshots. This focused approach ensures reliability for these scenarios while we gather feedback and iterate. From here, we’ll expand to broader use cases like weddings and events before GA.

How to Try It

In Lightroom Classic, Assisted Culling is available in the Library module and Import dialog.

Select your criteria, adjust the settings, and apply batch actions, such as flagging selects or deleting rejects.

FAQs

Q: Where is Assisted Culling available?
A: Lightroom Desktop and Lightroom Classic as part of the MAX 2025 release.
Q: How fast is it?
A: Our testing shows an average of 0.18 seconds per photo on modern devices (≈2000 photos in 8 minutes).
Q: What kinds of photos work best today?
A: Individual portraits and headshots.
Q: Do I need to pay extra?
A: No. Assisted Culling is included in your existing Lightroom subscription.

Feedback

Please share your experience in this thread. Include:

App version/platform

System details

Example images (optional)

Lisa Ngo / Kwamina Arthur – Product Managers, Lightroom

Posted by:

Feedback

Show previous replies

H

H.i.

Participant

It looks like assisted culling for Subject Focus is not doing a great job with macro photos where a significant part of the photo is out of focus but the subject is in focus.

Also my GF is marked as "Eyes open" but she has her eyes closed, wearing glasses but eyes are clearly visible.

Ian Lyons

Community Expert

@H.i.

> It looks like assisted culling for Subject Focus is not doing a great job with macro photos where a significant part of the photo is out of focus but the subject is in focus.

The header post for this thread includes the following paragraph

"Assisted Culling launches as Early Access at MAX 2025 with a narrow, high-confidence scope prioritizing portraits and headshots. This focused approach ensures reliability for these scenarios while we gather feedback and iterate. From here, we’ll expand to broader use cases like weddings and events before GA."

M

MSULLIVAN

Participant

Looking forward to using this new feature - although when I'm trying it today, it seems to be missing key features like: Organize Results and any batch processing. Not sure what I'm doing wrong.

M

MSULLIVAN

Participant

Right, I've managed to find it now in the main Library section. Definitely helps with culling but still going through one by one as out of 700 selects, there are a good 50 that are complete eye closed shots, despite choosing 80+ for focus and to reject even partial eye closed shots. Still - can't complain. Definitely easier work than culling the 2k shots!

K

kgdizainslv

Known Participant

After testing the new AI Culling feature in Lightroom Classic 15 on several real wedding and event shoots, I can say it’s not working at all as intended.

The “Subject in focus” and “Eyes in focus” scores are completely off. Very often, photos that are clearly out of focus get scores in the 90s, and sharp, perfectly focused portraits get very low ratings. In the example screenshot (can’t share the full image due to privacy), there are three people, all of them out of focus, but Lightroom shows almost perfect scores.

I understand it’s still an early beta, but right now it feels like the system is just assigning random numbers rather than analyzing actual sharpness or facial detail. I’ve tested it on multiple events and got the same results every time. At this point, it’s not reliable enough to use for any serious culling work.

C.Cella

Inspiring

Am I the only one that would perfectly understand the meaning of the numbers in the panel even without "Scores" prefix?
E.g

Current UI (tautological IMO)

Easier to read UI (non tautological)

.

R

remov_b4_flight

Known Participant

Assisted Culling at import dialog now always grayed/unavailable at my system.

Is thre any condition to use this?

MacOS 26.0.1 / M4 MBAir

RRKing

Inspiring

Lightroom Classic version: 15.0 [ 202510171722-44f87028 ]
Language setting: en
Operating system: Windows 10 - Business Edition
Version: 10.0.19045

Logical processor count: 24

System memory: 128GB

GPU Mem 24GB

It seems even when i'm not using Assisted Culling it's trying to analyze all my files in the catalog which is about 125K. There is no settings in the properties to manage this and i go back to look at it and it seems to just go back to 125K. If i leave it for a while it's at 88K but then it just went back to 100K of images left to anayle. Yet, i'm not even using it. I know i can just pause but why is it always doing all images in my total catalog instead of the the collection i choose. I mean if i choose a collection and start tinkering with the settings it seems to just do that collection but if i'm not using it at all it seems to hit all.

So my CPU is about at 40% and my harddrive is at like 450MB/sec non stop. I'm kind of okay of it doing my whole catalog but seeing how it resets so easy i'm curious will it ever finish?

Anywone else have this issue?

Rikk Flohr_Photography

Author

Community Manager

@RRKing, please check your settings in: Catalog Settings>Metadata>Assisted Culling...

Rikk Flohr: Adobe Photography Org

RRKing

Inspiring

Yep my fault. i completly ignored the catalog options thinking it was a system property or would be and just read the other individual talking about. I see now you have the option of both which makes sense. thank you

D

dennisp61922662

Participant

How do I get rid of assisted culling. It's just wasting space on my screen as I don't do people and I wouldn't trust a machine to do my culling anyhow.

D

dennisp61922662

Participant

Never mind. I discovered how to hide it.

E

EIMO34043688pfdi

Participating Frequently

Even though it will be difficult to implement technically, auto-stacking should be possible across multiple folders. To illustrate the purpose, I use the following scheme: The parent folder contains one subfolder for each camera.

mrdavie99

Inspiring

New Lightroom Classic version. Ok, load and go on with my business. But do not give me a heads-up about CULLING; just fail to close LR while all the images in my library are CULLED! I never felt better than I did after permanently turning off CULLING.

AI, I've got your number!

A

Andrew_Hill6878

Participant

I am finding an inconsitancy in the subject focus tab. if I set the sharpen to 50 I recieve 24 selects out of 42 photos with one photo that is clearly out of focus. if I then set it to 80 I get 3 photos which is great but the out of focus photo is still there for some reason so its not there yet but I will use it for fast sorting its most defenatly woth using.

thank you...

G

Gregorio_Hernandez4560

Participant

I just tried the assisted selection and I've run into something I'm not sure is a problem with the application or if I'm just missing something. I chose a folder with approximately 840 JPG files, and Lightroom selected half of them. I have it set to only show the selected photos, and I've also told Lightroom to create a collection with those selected photos. When the photos load, I switch to the Develop module, check, and it shows all the photos from the original folder. So, it made the selection, but it still loaded all the photos. I also checked the collection, and it's there too, with all the photos from the folder. What happened? I don't know. I've tried the process twice, and it's always the same result.

G

Gregorio_Hernandez4560

Participant

The problem was solved. After reading some comments from other users, I understood that with the Library module enabled, I should select "selected photos" in the right-hand column, instead of "all photos" as it was by default when all the photos were loaded.

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