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Rikk Flohr_Photography
Community Manager
Rikk Flohr_PhotographyCommunity Manager
September 24, 2025
Question

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

  • September 24, 2025
  • 77 replies
  • 8191 views

Introducing Assisted Culling (Early Access) in Lightroom Desktop 

For providing feedback for Lightroom Classic, 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 

  • Culling scores no longer recalculate when you switch preview sizes (e.g., grid view to detail view).  

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 

    77 replies

    Show previous replies
    T
    Tommy26531248zft7
    Participating Frequently
    March 10, 2026

    The automated culling is neither accurate in detecting focus vs blurry photos, nor in detecting eyes open vs shut.  I’ve tested this on 6 different extended photoshoots (magazine editorials) with over 3k photos.  In nearly every case, “eyes shut” detected photos where eyes are open.  “out of focus” culling failed to identify photos that were blurry and gave me lots of false positives instead.  Seems promising, would love to use this feature, but to date, it just isn’t ready.

    Sicardi
    Sicardi
    Participant
    March 5, 2026

     I’ve tried  3 different times and it is clearly not even close for wildlife photography. out of 2800 images from one morning shooting erratic birds (Snowy Egrets) fishing , only 250 were deemed “subject was focused”. It would be a huge positive for those of us shooting wildlife (and birds in particular) because you are panning while they are in-flight. and take over 50 images as you follow them (and that is a modest number). I didn’t go for the eye (which would be my preference) in focus because I tried that last time and I decided it was just too soon. But I had a good morning and lots of shots, so I tried Subject in focus this time. Still had many misses (and eyes were in focus as well as bird.) but often times birds will be a fair distance away and you end up with them small in frame and I do think this was the real challenge but also why I tried subject.  It would be a really positive feature for everyone, keep trying!

    J
    jonahlevine
    Participant
    April 9, 2026

    you can adjust the minimum focus level, so that it accepts more options.

    GrindedMustard
    GrindedMustard
    Participant
    March 2, 2026

    It would be nice if there were a feature excluding photos of a certain star rating or flag from being rejected.  Other than that, this is a useful feature, but it could be improved.

    N
    Nathaniel33146557gqrb
    Participant
    February 27, 2026

    Not at all useful. Rejects a ton of in-focus photos when culling for focus. 

      A
      Andrew22590856aehd
      Participant
      February 25, 2026

      So happy to see auto-stacking, thank you! One thing that’s slightly frustrating is that if you say import a bunch of jpeg/raw pairs, auto-stack them, then flag as reject/pick. If you filter the rejects and delete all, it only deletes the top photo from each stack. It would be great if you could flag the actual stack rather than just the top photo, as this seems to be the intuitive behaviour that you might expect

      jaytownscreative
      jaytownscreative
      Participant
      February 21, 2026

      Great concept with real potential, but the current execution has some friction worth addressing.

      First, focus detection feels inconsistent. Rather than applying a fixed standard, it'd be more useful to weight sharpness relative to the best image in the set — then calibrate from there.

      Second, the bigger issue: the feature re-analyzes images mid-session. If it decides to re-evaluate while you're previewing one-by-one, it bumps you back to the start of the gallery. When that happens every 20–30 seconds, the workflow breaks down entirely.

      Hoping to see these ironed out — the thinking behind it is solid.

      ShootingPixelsAndy
      ShootingPixelsAndy
      Inspiring
      February 21, 2026

      It seems very broken for me. This image was flagged as a reject for both subject and eye focus both set to 70%.

      I tested in the Feb 2026 update and get identical results in Lightroom Desktop and Classic.

       


      and these images were rated as follows:

      Left - Subject 62, Eye 42
      Right - Subject 98, Eye 98

      Something very wrong there!

       

      808AV8R
      808AV8R
      Participant
      February 20, 2026
      • App Version 9.1  
      • Apple MacBook Pro M1 Max (2021) 64GB
      • 2,090 images of volcano photography Sony RAW files (ARW)

      The issue I had was that, yesterday, when I tried culling for the first time using only the 100% Sharpness parameter box checked, it instantly sorted all files within a few minutes into about ½ and ½ Selects versus Rejects. I had also tried to copy paste a grade from one photo to the other 2,170 photos (yes there were more, but today only 2,090 images would load) but the grade somehow looked messed up by leaving blue-dot artifacts in the darker areas of most of the other 2,169 images, so I had deleted all these from my LR.  

      Today however, I tried again by importing all images (like I said, only 2090 of the original 2170 loaded) and tried culling based on 100% sharpness again. This time, it took almost 3 hours and no accumulating results showing in neither the Selects or the Rejects image count, and after three hours, I had a 0 Selects 0 Rejects result. It gave me some sort of message to the effect of (Uh oh, a black hole….” but I can’t see the exact wording anymore, because as I write this, it has re-started the 3-hour process of analyzing all 2,090 image s again.

      What is going on, or what am I doing wrong (did I corrupt my files from yesterday?) and why wont assisted culling give me results today?

      808AV8R
      808AV8R
      Participant
      February 21, 2026

      UPDATE: I went through, closed all open tabs, deleted the photo set and re-uploaded it, then re-analyzed in LightRoom (new version update 9.2)with Subject Focus slider at 100. Got 387 “Selects” and 1703 “Rejects”. I guess its hard to detect a subject when the subject is two side-by-side fountains of lava that are 800-1000’+ tall at night, so I can forgive the assisted Culling for so many “rejects” in this case. They key update here is that it did seem to get through all 2090 photos in about 12 miniutes as opposed to three+ hours. 

      Also, my concern about the blue-dot artifacts was simply the sofware’s version of black clipping inadvertently turned on. Apparently, I hade unintentionally pressed the “j” key on the keyboard, which can toggle black clipping on and off. (It is challenging to expose for bright incandescent lava without the surrounding black lava fields being underexposed). 

      apricothaze
      apricothaze
      Participant
      February 18, 2026

      Worked reasonably well on photos of squirrels. However, it didn’t seem to work nearly as well on macro photos of plants.

      daveatrsa
      daveatrsa
      Participant
      February 16, 2026

       i MADE THE MISTAKE OF ANALYSING MY ENTIRE PORTFOLIO WHICH TOOK 7 HOURS, SILLY ME! THE ONE THING I DID NOTICE IS MANY SHOTS WITH A BLURRED  FOREGROUND OR BACKGROUND EITHER SHOT THAT WAY OR PUT IN VIA AI WERE REJECTED BUT MAYBE I DID NOT PUT IN THE REIGHT SETTINGS? HOWEVER, I THINK IT IS A GREAT TOOL AND I WILL TRY AGAIN. MAYBE A CANCEL BUTTON WOULD BE A GREAT ADDITION ONCE ONE REALISES THEIR ERROR?

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