Community Manager

Question

(Early Access) Assisted Culling (Lightroom Ecosystem - Desktop)

Forum|Forum|4 months ago
September 24, 2025
45 replies
4609 views

Introducing Assisted Culling (Early Access) in Lightroom Desktop

For providing feedback for Lightroom Classic, click here.

We’re excited to share an early look at Assisted Culling, an AI-powered workflow that helps photographers quickly review large photo sets and select the best shots with confidence.

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:

Open Lightroom Desktop.

Find Assisted Culling in the left photo panel.

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.

Giving Feedback:

Please share your experience in this thread. Include:

App version/platform

System details

Example images (optional)

Your feedback helps us refine our models and user experience.

Lisa Ngo / Kwamina Arthur – Product Managers, Lightroom

Posted by:

Feedback

S

SenkethyaSarPhotography

Participant

I have been using the AI Culling Assistance in Lightroom, and while it is a great start, there are a few key features missing that would make it much more powerful for wildlife and bird photographers.

When shooting bursts of high-speed action, I would like to suggest the following improvements:

1. Persistent and Sortable Metadata Scores Currently, the AI scores aren't easily saved or used for organization. It would be a huge improvement if the AI "Quality Score" was saved into the metadata. This would allow us to Sort by Score, making it much faster to identify the best images from a burst and decide which ones to keep or delete.

2. Comparative Scoring for Selected Sequences When reviewing a burst of images, I often need to find the "sharpest of the bunch." I would like to see a feature where I can select a group of photos and have the AI identify which one has the highest sharpness score relative to the others in that specific selection.

3. Balancing Sharpness with Composition (The "Memory" Factor) Sometimes, an entire burst sequence might not reach a "perfect" sharpness score, but a specific frame captures a unique posture or a rare moment. It would be great if the AI could help highlight the "best of a bad batch" so I can ensure I keep at least one or two memory-worthy shots from a sequence, even if they aren't technically perfect.

I hope the Adobe team considers these additions to make the culling workflow more efficient for those of us dealing with thousands of high-speed action shots.

S

SenkethyaSarPhotography

Participant

I have been using the AI Culling Assistance in Lightroom, and while it is a great start, there are a few key features missing that would make it much more powerful for wildlife and bird photographers.

When shooting bursts of high-speed action, I would like to suggest the following improvements:

1. Persistent and Sortable Metadata Scores Currently, the AI scores aren't easily saved or used for organization. It would be a huge improvement if the AI "Quality Score" was saved into the metadata. This would allow us to Sort by Score, making it much faster to identify the best images from a burst and decide which ones to keep or delete.

2. Comparative Scoring for Selected Sequences When reviewing a burst of images, I often need to find the "sharpest of the bunch." I would like to see a feature where I can select a group of photos and have the AI identify which one has the highest sharpness score relative to the others in that specific selection.

3. Balancing Sharpness with Composition (The "Memory" Factor) Sometimes, an entire burst sequence might not reach a "perfect" sharpness score, but a specific frame captures a unique posture or a rare moment. It would be great if the AI could help highlight the "best of a bad batch" so I can ensure I keep at least one or two memory-worthy shots from a sequence, even if they aren't technically perfect.

I hope the Adobe team considers these additions to make the culling workflow more efficient for those of us dealing with thousands of high-speed action shots.

JRGarciaProductions

Participant

Great in theory… it would be great if there was the ability to stop it form analyzing while still seeing the results. It’s difficult to edit because when you start scrolling, it starts to re-analyze everything and then kicks back to the beginning.

N

Nico Burchett

Participant

Hello, this new Lightroom application is a great addition. I do think one button needs to be added. Rather than the assisted culling starting automatically after changing some settings. It would seem less glitchy if there were a button to start assisted culling. I was helping a friend of mine use the new tool, and after changing some settings, we got a decent result, then changed a few more, and the tool just stopped working. I'm assuming maybe because we were changing too many settings at one time but it could also be the fact of that auto feature for the culling. Let me know what you think!

Thanks!

W

wonderful_Odyssey6C1B

Participant

Summary: RAW versions of RAW - JPG-cover pairs are rejected, but the JPG covers are accepted

I typically upload RAW images and their cover JPGs into the same album in LR. Running Assisted Culling for sharpness, often rejects the RAW images of the RAW - JPG-cover pairs, while the JPG image is accepted. Unless I'm missing something with respect to organizing and culling RAW images, the expected behavior should be to treat those pairs as the same.

Rikk Flohr_Photography

Author

Community Manager

@wonderful_Odyssey6C1B JPEG files are typically sharpened by the camera's built-in processor and will always be sharper in appearance than the raw file. It would diffcult to treat them as the same - as they are not!

You have multiple options. Here are a few:

Adjust your slider value downward so sharper raws are included
Presharpen your raws on import with a Raw Default prior to running the culling models
Separate raws and JPEGs into collections prior to running the culling models

Rikk Flohr: Adobe Photography Org

gerardov

Participant

I think a better pattern for future versions should be a "Prefer Format" setting. Where in Culling settings you can decide which format to prefer: RAW or non-RAW. In general terms and for professionals, you know you can improve the exposure and sharpness, yet you may want to still download and cull through all photos no matter what type.

M

Maldon Seasalt

Participating Frequently

MacBook Pro OS 26.1 and Adobe Lightoom 9.0:

I attempted my first cull last night and learned the hard way that you need to begin the Assisted Culling process in a specific album instead of going to "All Photos" and either 1) selecting the new photos you want it to analyze or, better yet, 2) having it analyze images from one of the "Recently Added" buckets.

Despite my selecting specific images in "All Photos," the Assisted Culling tool analyzed my entire library. Worse yet, there's no Cancel button to abort — or at least I couldn't find one.

Beginning in "All Photos" was my error, even though the Assisted Culling option is listed in the "All Photos" view. (The tutorial set me straight on this, but it seems this tool shouldn't be actionable in the "All Photos" mode without a pop-up window asking if you really want to analyze your whole library.)

Perhaps from a programming standpoint, I can understand the need to begin the culling process in a specific album. But practically speaking, why make an album of photos you haven't yet reviewed? Being able to select new images from "All Photos" or one of the "Recently Added" folders would be a huge help. I have since used the Assisted Culling and Auto-Stacking tools on established albums and they worked well overall. The tools certainly help to take the anxiety out of photo reviews by grouping the similar images into manageable stacks.

One other area for improvement: Once you've reviewed the culls and put them in stacks, you can't review the stacked images in a traditional "Square Grid." You need to look at them in the "Detail" view, which provides one large image plus thumbnails of the other images in the sliding grid below, and even then it takes two clicks to get there. (See screen shots.) Using the "Detail" view is not a big deal if the stack contains a few photos, but it's deinitely a challenge if the stack contains anything more the five or six images.

One other limitation: You can't see the stacks in Lightroom Mobile. That's been an ongoing issue with merged HDR images, too, so it would be great if Adobe could find a way to address that.

Conceptually, I love these new tools — thank you, Adobe! — and look forward to making them part of my workflow once developers move past the Early Access phase.

M

Michael28936469pgil

Participant

You need to have the ability to move rejected shots to the keep folder, that way I can just delete all rejected shots rather than having to manually do it if there are a few rejected ones I want to keep.

M

Maldon Seasalt

Participating Frequently

Thanks for the new Assisted Culling feature in Lightroom 9.0. Very helpful. For Stacking, it would be helpful to be able to see the images from a specific stack in an isolated and much larger Square Grid rather than in Detail view, where the images are smaller and less manageable. It would also be helpful to be able to create Substacks from Stacks with many images. (MacBook Pro OS 26.1, Lightroom 9.0).

S

SenkethyaSarPhotography

Participant

This feature is greate, but there are room to improve.
The tried to compare the reject vs accept with just subject focuse set to 80 here is the result.