Introducing Assisted Culling (Early Access) in Lightroom Classic. For providing feedback for Lightroom Desktop, click here. TL;DR – Assisted Culling is getting faster, more powerful, and more accurate as we head to GA. If you tried in October 2025, we urge you to try the new version and give us feedback – especially for wedding & portrait photographers. We’re eager to hear your feedback! Assisted Culling has received several updates since Early Access launched in October 2025. If you tried it then, here's what's new: April 2026 Significantly improved handling of shallow depth-of-field for photos – a major customer ask. Images with intentional background blur are now more reliably recognized and kept rather than rejected as out-of-focus. We’ve retrained the “Reject model” so it has more accurate identification of reject-worthy images. Additionally, an image can now be flagged under multiple reject reasons simultaneously: Exposure Issues: includes a sensitivity slider so you can control the threshold Documents Misfires: ground shots and severe blur February 2026 Expanded support from individual portraits to multi-person scenes, including weddings, events, and group photos. Improved eye detection accuracy in dense group and wedding scenes Cleaner subject separation when multiple people are close together Fewer false "eyes closed" results on groups and portraits FAQs: Q: Where is Assisted Culling available? A: Lightroom Desktop and Lightroom Classic. Q: What kinds of photos work best today? A: Individual portraits and multi-person scenes, including weddings, events, and group photos. Q: Can I adjust how strict the culling is? A: Yes. Each criterion can be toggled on or off, and Subject Focus, Eye Focus, and Exposure Issues include sensitivity sliders for finer control. 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) Kwamina Arthur, Product Manager, Lightroom

Rikk Flohr_Photography

Question

(Early Access) Assisted Culling (LrClassic)

Forum|Forum|7 months ago
September 24, 2025
60 replies
116112 views

Introducing Assisted Culling (Early Access) in Lightroom Classic.

For providing feedback for Lightroom Desktop, click here.

TL;DR – Assisted Culling is getting faster, more powerful, and more accurate as we head to GA. If you tried in October 2025, we urge you to try the new version and give us feedback – especially for wedding & portrait photographers. We’re eager to hear your feedback!

Assisted Culling has received several updates since Early Access launched in October 2025. If you tried it then, here's what's new:

April 2026

Significantly improved handling of shallow depth-of-field for photos – a major customer ask. Images with intentional background blur are now more reliably recognized and kept rather than rejected as out-of-focus.

We’ve retrained the “Reject model” so it has more accurate identification of reject-worthy images. Additionally, an image can now be flagged under multiple reject reasons simultaneously:

Exposure Issues: includes a sensitivity slider so you can control the threshold

Documents

Misfires: ground shots and severe blur

February 2026

Expanded support from individual portraits to multi-person scenes, including weddings, events, and group photos.

Improved eye detection accuracy in dense group and wedding scenes

Cleaner subject separation when multiple people are close together

Fewer false "eyes closed" results on groups and portraits

FAQs:

Q: Where is Assisted Culling available?
A: Lightroom Desktop and Lightroom Classic.

Q: What kinds of photos work best today?
A: Individual portraits and multi-person scenes, including weddings, events, and group photos.

Q: Can I adjust how strict the culling is?
A: Yes. Each criterion can be toggled on or off, and Subject Focus, Eye Focus, and Exposure Issues include sensitivity sliders for finer control.

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)

Kwamina Arthur, Product Manager, Lightroom

Feedback

Show previous replies

I

info@kovacsbea.hu

Participating Frequently

For some reason, it's not working on my MacBook Pro. It analyzes my photos, but stays inactive. Work well on my desktop. Any idea what I can do?

macOS Sequioia 15.6.1

C

Cooper.W.Photography

Participating Frequently

Anyone able to point me in the correct direction, I'm on 6.8.0.821 in creative cloud on both my mac and windows yet I'm still missing the 15.0 update. Highest I can go up to is 14.5.1. Any help would be great!

john beardsworth

Community Expert

See https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/lightroom-classic/system-requirements.html

T

Tony Rican

Participant

I take culling super seriously and cull over 500k photos a year. Will have more and more feedback going forward, but within 5 minutes, I'd say that my first thought is that it's too fast. I don't need it to look through 2000 photos and provide mediocore result within 2 minutes. I'd much rather wait 15 mintues and have sliders that will let me dynamically adjust the number of selects based on criteria unique to said shoot. This will let me dial in selects that actually work for a shoot. E.g. I shoot in some scenes where the exposure issue setting would be really helpful, others not, some scenes the eye focus, some not, etc. To this end, auto scene selection based on camera and lens and the scene itself would be helpful. For events we usually shoot different shots with different camera lens combos, that meta data can be leveraged to present the user with "scenes" to confirm for futher analysis, and then culling for each scene. Running the software on some older shoot where I didn't delete the outtakes, it's rejecting delivered photos at a high rate. At the end of the day AI may never be able to cull perfectly, but I'd at least like it to make the process faster.

A

Andrew_Hill6878

Participant

Yep after using this I’m the same I would rather go through the pain
staking process of sorting my photos myself. This update don’t work for
me.

D

defaultqoq9m8640sv9

Participant

I'd like to take what assisted culling gives me (rejects and selects) and further cull them within the Library module. If I could apply the reject flag to the rejects and the flag to the selects or perhaps star ratings to both groups this would be very handy. What if the rejects are inaccurate I have no way of knowing and don't want to go through them all one by one at the Import screen. I'd like to do this in Library with photos that have acquired attributes from the Assisted Culling analysis.

C

Chris Lipscombe

Participating Frequently

Assisted Culling seems to be working well for me. I do have a suggestion:

I like reviewing my auto-rejected images zoom in / full screen instead of thumbnail view. However, if I come across an image that is rejected, I have to back out of full screen and return to the thumbnails in order to mark it as accepted instead of rejected.

My suggestion is allow us to choose the red X and green checkmarks while zoomed in / full screen so we don't have to keep backing out to thumbnail view.

Other than that, this feature is working pretty well for early access.

john beardsworth

Community Expert

Do you mean the Full Screen mode (press F) and not the simple Loupe view? If so, you have always been able to use the keyboard shortcuts like P, U, X.

C

Chris Lipscombe

Participating Frequently

Loupe view I guess ... with the side bars visible.

Yes, those keys would do as a work-around. I would prefer to use the red x and green checkmark that assisted cullingn is using, since that is what it is designed for. Should not be a big deal to add that to LR when while assisted culling in loupe view.

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

Legend

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

@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

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