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

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A

ArcherA4

Known Participant

I think this is going to be very useful

Trying on some non portrait subjects it was still selecting sharpness well. I was happy to start drilling down on some big bursts by moving the subject focus slider on the assisted culling panel and having the Selects/Rejects displayed change in real time. I suppose it is the same as upvoting the "rank by focus score" but I found myself trying to select the "sharpest" so some granularity would help - the sharpness changes in tens and I couldn't type a number into the slider or scrub the number, or slow scrub with the shift key, all of which would be nice to pick the sharpest, or the top three or four out of thirty etc

Nice function!

Mike

Lightroom Classic version: 15.0 [ 202510171722-44f87028 ]

License: Creative Cloud

Operating system: Windows 11 - Home Premium Edition

Version: 11.0.26200

Application architecture: x64

System architecture: x64

Processor speed: 2.9GHz

J

Jabbermack69

Participant

Hi,

How do I unselect the selected "rejects" that I want to put back into the "selected "images section

McToddy

Participating Frequently

right-click the image -> Assisted Culling -> Mark as Select....

A

Arnhem Shore

Participant

What am I doing wrong here? Imported 900 photos, it analysed all of them but didn't select or reject any and didn't give an culling scores...

McToddy

Participating Frequently

This took me a bit to figure out the behavior to get the culling grading (i.e., displaying the green checkmarks or red x's -- see the blue higlights below) to work. You need to have both ...
1) the Assisted Culling panel display (see dropdown arrow in orange highlight)
2) have some criteria (pink highlight) selected.... this can be either criteria from Select or Reject -- you just need to have some criteria specified.

If you have no criteria specified (pink highlight), no green/red indicators (blue highlight) will be shown...

Similarily, if criteria is specified, but the culling panel not visible (orange highlight), the green/red culling indicators are not display (blue) but other library indicators are shown

M

Mladenovic12

Participant

So far i have positive feedback for assistive culling, however for that option there is only one thing missing...you need to add "duplicate" selection and not stacking. Stacking is not working correctly but instead add duplicate selection.

A

Andriesv

Participant

I have tried everything Out of 2224 pictures nothing rejected. It does nothing except stacking. Ag siestog ags shame

R

remov_b4_flight

Known Participant

Want to aim for: Learn what users have manually rejected.

And use it for assistive culling.

J

JuAn

Participant

The new feature in v15 is Auto culling. I would like that when I import photo's. However when I'm now in the Catalog menu it starts analyzing ALL my existing files in the background (all 65000!!!). I do not want that, only when I import new files. How to switch this off? A simple enable/disable button would be nice...

A

Aleke

Community Manager

Hi @1650245, welcome to the community!
When you get a chance, try going to Edit > Catalog Settings > Metadata and unchecking the options under the Assisted Culling section. That should help resolve the issue.
Let me know how it goes!
Alek

*(If you mention me with an @, like @Aleke, I’ll get a notification and can respond faster.)*

R

remov_b4_flight

Known Participant

I want to add for assisted culling 'Reject' panel ...

"Half opened eyes"

R

remov_b4_flight

Known Participant

Assisted Culling -> Reject -> Exposure Issues checkbox is on that selects not only missed overexposure but also intentional saturated exposure.

It seems thresholds need to be reconsidered.

E

Eckoephoto

Participant

Agree with this. Sliders like the Focus maybe?

E

Eckoephoto

Participant

I've been working my process with Aftershoot, and recently with Evoto for culling, and I'm happy with Aftershoots results, I can't see how it got there to make other decisions later. I absolutely can here.. Thank you for letting us into the decision making process. This will likely take over my culling process here. Less exporting files, less disk space, and therefore, better long term efficiency.

For the Organize results section, I would LOVE to have granularity here, and a workflow rather than JUST select/reject.

For every score, allow an action, not just select/don't select. Run it through a progression. Start everything at 3 stars, If it's a missfire, -2, if it's got an exposure issue, -1 star, subject in focus +1 Star, Eyes in Focus, +1 Star. This would give us granulartiy. I can do this manually in stages, and the system is fast enough that it would still be a net positive in time, but it would be amazing to automate it.

Again thanks, this is going to be process altering in a very positive way.