Question

P: Assisted Culling Feedback Thread (LrC)

Forum|Forum|1 month ago
June 11, 2026
23 replies
935 views

Assisted Culling is now generally available in Lightroom Classic

TL; DR: Assisted Culling has graduated from Early Access to General Availability. It gives you a fast, reviewable first pass on large shoots: it surfaces your strongest frames and sets aside the obvious rejects, so you spend less time comparing near-duplicates. You stay in control: review everything, adjust the thresholds, and override any call. If you tried it back in October 2025, it's substantially more accurate now, especially for wedding, event, group, and portrait work. We'd love for you to give it another look and tell us what you think in this thread.

What it does

Open an album or collection, run a cull, and Assisted Culling analyzes your images against the criteria you choose: Subject Sharpness, Eye Sharpness, Eyes Open, exposure, and more. It marks Selects and Rejects, shows you why behind every call, and leaves the final decision to you.

How far it's come since Early Access

February 2026: Expanded from individual portraits to multi-person scenes: weddings, events, and group photos. Better eye detection in dense scenes, cleaner separation when people are close together, and fewer false "eyes closed" results.

April 2026: Much-improved handling of shallow depth-of-field, so shots with intentional background blur are kept rather than rejected as out-of-focus. Retrained reject detection that can flag an image under multiple reasons at once (Exposure Issues with a sensitivity slider, Documents, Misfires). Scores no longer recalculate when you switch preview sizes.

June 2026 (GA)

Faces: per-face Eye Sharpness and Eyes Open scores for group and multi-person shots. Click on any face to see exactly how it was scored.

More reliable Eyes Open results in larger groups.

A clearer review of workflow and in-product guidance, so the assistive, reviewable nature is obvious from the first run.

Getting started

Open an album, then choose Assisted Culling › Cull. Full walkthrough here.

FAQs

Q: Where is Assisted Culling available?

A: Lightroom Desktop and Lightroom Classic.

Q: Does the AI decide for me?

A: No. Assisted Culling makes a first pass that you review. You can adjust how strict each criterion is and override any Select or Reject at any time. Nothing is final until you say so.

Q: What happens to my Rejects? Are they deleted?

A: No. Rejects are simply grouped for your review and stay in your album. You decide whether to keep, label, move, or delete them. Nothing is removed unless you choose to.

Q: What kind of photos work best today?

A: Individual portraits and multi-person scenes: weddings, events, and group photos.

Q: Can I keep working while Assisted Culling runs?

A: Yes. While Assisted Culling analyzes your images, you can review, rate, and edit them as usual. Analysis stops if you turn off the culling filters or switch to a different album or source.

Q: Does Assisted Culling re-analyze the same photos every time I run it?

A: No. Once an image has been analyzed, its scores are cached and reused in future culling sessions. If you edit an image, its scores are recalculated the next time you run Assisted Culling on it.

Q: Can I adjust how strict the culling is?

A: Yes. Each criterion can be toggled on or off, and Subject Sharpness, Eye Sharpness, and Exposure Issues include sensitivity sliders for finer control.

Q: Does it work for wildlife, sports, or landscapes?

A: Assisted Culling is currently tuned for people-focused photography: portraits, weddings, events, and groups. You can run it on other types of photos, but results may be less reliable for now.

Q: Do I need to pay extra?

A: No. Assisted Culling is included in your existing Lightroom subscription.

Feedback

This is the place for it. We read every reply. When you post, please include:

App version and platform

System details

Example images (optional, but they help a lot)

Kwamina Arthur, Product Manager, Lightroom

Show previous replies

K

Kiwimac99

Participating Frequently

It would be nice if this worked for subjects other than people.

Wedding and events are not the only kinds of photography that Lightroom users do…!

J

Joe U

Participating Frequently

Also weddings and events are not only photos of people!

K

kgdizainslv

Known Participant

Also, the new Assisted Culling feature in v15.4.1 is completely useless and unusable. It is painfully slow. As seen in Screenshot 2026-06-27 at 22.44.36.jpg, when "Faces" is active, the Library module becomes critically sluggish and lagging, regardless of whether "Show overlays" is checked or not.

I see absolutely no point in adding features like this if they cannot optimize them to run fast. Standard previews are already fully generated, yet it runs like absolute garbage on both my Mac Studio and MacBook Pro. Why does Lightroom Classic become more of a mess with every single update? Is Adobe hiring vibe coders now? 😂

J

jjjrrr59

Participant

Just ran culling on a set of Street and Cityscape pictures I took last month. Of my 14 selects, it rejected 8 and suggested keeping other inferior shots. So not much use to me.

edcphoto

Participant

Just ran this for the first time. Out of 51 frames it caught 3 and missed 6, not terribly accurate. Some were partially closed eyes but they were close enough they should have been caught. See one example.

wilhelm medetz

Participating Frequently

Update for the memory leak problem on Windows 11

The following is a simpler scenario where I can reproduce the memory leak.

Create a new catalog.
Import 800 photos (shot on an iPhone 11/12 with Lightroom Mobile).
Built standard previews for all photos.
Start Address lookup + Duplicates detection + Face detection and wait until all background tasks are finished.
Optimize catalog.
Restart LrC - 1.2 GB memory usage (displayed in Windows Task Manager), idle CPU usage.
Start Assisted Culling analysis background task.
After analyzing 170 photos LrC memory usage is up to 18.7 GB.

Same behavior when GPU usage is disabled.

N

niftypitchers

Participating Frequently

Stacking: Not being able to use stacks across folders renders it useless to me. If I can see files from several folders at once, either by Show Subfolders or by selecting more than one folder, then why don’t stacks work that way? It’s not like stacks are real—they are just concepts represented visually. If a stack is in folder A, and another image from the stack is in folder B, then you could just show the stack in both places. Then if two folders with the same stack are selected, just show one stack.

Assisted Culling: Please make it more clear how to turn this off. Most of us don’t shoot events. Another barrier to use is that if it fails ever, it’s useless. Having to review what Lightroom thinks is no good negates any time savings. (I feel like I might not be understanding the utility of this feature properly.)

This is one of the biggest problems with data provided by Ai in general. If you can only believe it 65% of the time, then what’s the point? Do the work yourself, or risk getting burned.

Duplicate Detection: It’s still working on detecting duplicates for a library of 135k files, so I can’t yet comment on how well it works.

There are two options for what to do with Duplicates. One is Remove from Catalog, which leaves the images on disk where they are, and the other is Delete from disk. This works the same way as “Remove From Catalog” does, and it’s not really an accurately-stated option. It doesn’t remove anything from disk (unless your files are on a server, and then it warns you), it just moves the file to the trash. The trash is on the disk. Why doesn’t it say “Move file to trash”? “Delete from disk” sounds pretty scary and unrecoverable.

I’m curious about the scenario where removing it from the catalog but leaving it on disk makes sense. You would end up with orphaned files. Maybe if the file(s) are being managed by another app?

john beardsworth

Community Expert

Stacking: Not being able to use stacks across folders renders it useless to me. If I can see files from several folders at once, either by Show Subfolders or by selecting more than one folder, then why don’t stacks work that way? It’s not like stacks are real—they are just concepts represented visually. If a stack is in folder A, and another image from the stack is in folder B, then you could just show the stack in both places. Then if two folders with the same stack are selected, just show one stack.

Stacking is in individual folders, as it always was since Lr1, but is also available in collections.

So when processing multiple folders as a single shoot, add the photos to a collection.

J

Joe U

Participating Frequently

To be completely honest, AI-assisted culling is nearly useless for events with the way that Lightroom Classic currently classifies the "subject" of a photo.

In my experience, the ‘subject’ as identified by LrC is anything that vaguely resembles a person in the image (unless there are no people). This includes the actual subject of the image, aka the person or people who are in focus, but also anyone else in the frame at various depths.

For example, if you have a photo of an audience and are focusing on one person, then use a “Select Subject” mask, the mask includes the subject (person in focus) and the several other out-of-focus individuals because, I’m assuming, the coding behind Lightroom is programmed to say “people = subject,” without any nuance to calculate “well, maybe only the person/people that are in focus are the subject; and not those other folks.”

My point being is that it seems like AI-assisted culling is using the same “Select Subject” logic to dish out culling scores, and flat out rejecting images because it bundles the true subject with out-of-focus/distant people in the background (who are not the subject); lowering the culling score into reject territory.

It’s just a faulty foundation in my opinion, and though I’m sure it works for family photos at weddings and similar scenarios, I can’t imagine it can get through an entire day’s worth of event photos without creating more problems than it solves.

I say this as someone who would love for this feature to actually save me time and I appreciate the effort! Unfortunately, in its current iteration, it is not a tool I’m able to find value in.

Patrick_F_SSGrille

Participating Frequently

Thanks @Joe U

I used to do some large corporate events, most was just “documentation” and giving guests better shots than they could get with their phones. It has been about 12 years since I had to shoot couples going into dinner, like around 400 couples, there were three shooter usually. Never did color corrections or anything, just looking for eyes open, and which shot makes “the dress” look better. Usually two or three options taken. In the film days we would print overnight and put them out the next morning, tossing the “bad” ones in the trash.

When we went digital we got the process down to under an hour. As shooting started I would grab cards, and start pulling the good ones, and start printing on two Kodak photo printers we would drag along with us. 4-6 seconds per print. Then bring those up to the ballroom, put them out on custom display stands, swap cards, and repeat. Usually the whole process from first shot to last print was about an hour. So as guests were leaving dinner they could just grab them and go. Now I think they have just swapped to just hosting them digitally, bet with the face recognition it could probably just pick you out of the 400 or so couples.

So I was hoping that the “culling” process might have been able to do that first stage, find only the ones where eyes are open, heads are facing forward, and if all the shots of that couple met those criteria, either pick the “better” one, or show me all of them so I can decide. The ones where only one shot passed the criteria, just send that to be printed.

What frustrated me was there was no simple “Turn Off” option right there under “Culling.” I was out shooting along a Bike Rail Trail over the weekend. Brought all the RAW into LrC, and manually selected the shots I wanted in the collection. 99 shots coming in, easy enough. Then I started color correcting, and cropping, and noticed that the 99 went down to 78 or so, and all the shots I had worked on, a bunch disappeared. Hmmm. Reimported the 99 again, they were there, then I noticed the “culling” process activating, and blink back down to 78 again.

I suppose it was working “as intended” as it dropped mainly the duplicates of what I shot. I little wider in this one, slight shift left on this one, change the focal point in this one, so there were a lot of duplicates there, but that is because I have no idea what the web designers want, and need to give them options. You start placing text or maps over the top of an image you may want it to be blurry on the “other side” of the page.

So after an hour of looking up how to shut it off, I think I finally have it stopped. I hope it does not come on again unless I want it on again. I think Adobe needs to be better at adding in the “improvements.”  Yes the pop up of “What’s New” when they come down is great, but maybe put in a switch on each new thing, to enable or disable it. If I were under the pressure of turning these shots around that day, I would have tossed LrC in the trash for good. The interface keeps getting worse at each update.

AI has been a great add on, but only when I ASK it to run. So Adobe, any new AI features, don’t just enable them. Keep them off until I want to use them. Sure prompt me when I am selecting photos, “Do you want AI to cull these for you?” With the show this again switch at the bottom. Just don’t assume we all want it, all the time. You know what they say when you assume.

J

Joe U

Participating Frequently

Very interesting workflow and approach, thank you for sharing. I love the idea of delivering ANYTHING in under an hour. That’s like delivering a pizza haha.

Admittedly, I don’t know anything about software development, but with Adobe and other software companies like Aftershoot, Imagen, etc., I feel like they have the bones of what it would take to make this useful, but they have just implemented everything with the wrong order of operations.

E.G. They will take every burst/scene consisting of similar images and choose “the best”, using mostly objective criteria like eyes open, subject focus, etc.

Okay, cool, but then I wish they would take this to the next level and compare those “best” images against each other to determine that many of those “scenes” don’t contain any good images at all. Why are you giving me the “best” photo of the floor from when my shutter button bumped against my leg?

Lightroom does this better than most, which is what makes it even more frustrating that it does so many other things worse.

I imagine it is frustrating to read feedback (complaints) from all of the armchair experts who don’t know the first thing about what it takes to deploy a piece of software at scale, and I’m under no illusion that I have the faintest idea.

The best we can do is provide genuine, realistic feedback, which is better than just stewing in front of your computer hoping they fix a thing that you never even mention in an official context.

Patrick_F_SSGrille

Participating Frequently

How do I shut this off? I do not need any “AI Assisting me” to make the decisions of what images I want to keep. If I go back to Event Shooting yes, it would be great. It keeps dumping all the slight variations that I have purposely shot.

N

niftypitchers

Participating Frequently

Catalog Settings>Metadata panel. It took me a little while to find it, too. It should be off by default, but I don’t think it is.

wilhelm medetz

Participating Frequently

Problem still occurs with LrC 15.4.1

peter-foto

Participant

Lightroom Classic Version: 15.4
Camera Raw Version: 18.4
Platform: macOS (Apple Silicon, MacBook Pro M1 Max)

Issue:
I accidentally started AI Assisted Image Selection on my entire catalog containing 262,118 photos.

After starting the analysis, Lightroom began analyzing the complete catalog. CPU usage increased to between 200% and 400% and remains at that level continuously.

The problem is that I can no longer stop the analysis process.

Observed behavior:

The Activity panel shows:
- Assisted Image Selection: Paused
- Duplicate Detection: Paused
- Face Detection: Paused
- Address Lookup: Paused
All options in the Assisted Image Selection panel are disabled.
The panel currently shows 0 selected and 0 rejected photos.
Batch Actions is disabled (greyed out).
Nevertheless, Lightroom still displays “Photos are being analyzed”.
CPU usage remains between 200% and 400%.

Troubleshooting already performed:

Quit and restarted Lightroom Classic.
Restarted macOS.
Disabled Wi-Fi completely and restarted Lightroom.
Verified with Activity Monitor that CPU usage immediately rises again after launching Lightroom, even with no network connection.
CPU usage drops to zero when Lightroom is closed.
CPU usage returns immediately when Lightroom is reopened.

Expected behavior:
There should be a way to completely cancel or remove queued AI analysis tasks. Once all analysis options are disabled and all processes show “Paused”, Lightroom should stop background processing and release CPU resources.

Catalog size:
262,118 photos.

Additional note:
For large professional catalogs, accidental activation of AI analysis can result in many days of continuous CPU activity. Users need a reliable method to fully stop or cancel the process.

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