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Rikk Flohr_Photography
Community Manager
Community Manager
September 24, 2025
Question

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

  • 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:

45 replies

Participant
October 29, 2025

A great filter for wildlife (and model) photography on my wishlist:


  • two eye-contact (animal or model staring into the camera)
  • one eye contact
  • no eye-contact

Please train the model on this - pleeeeeeaaaasssseeee! 🙂 

PS: also we a simple non-AI filter option -> cropped + not-cropped images (some photo contest demand this)

Participant
October 29, 2025

I am thrilled with the new feature!

1. Feature Request: Additional Filters

It would be desirable to add more filters to the function to enable the selection of specific styles.

2. Optimization & Feature Request: Image Stacking (RAW/JPG)

I find the stack creation itself to be excellent. However, I have an optimization and a feature request regarding the display and import:

Since I capture images in both JPG and RAW formats, I would like the images to be automatically stacked upon import. In this process, the RAW file should be used as the title image (preview/main image) of the stack.

Current Behavior/Request: Currently, the JPG file is consistently used as the main image in the stack by default. Can this be configured (e.g., setting the priority for the title image)? Alternatively, an option for automatic stack creation already during the import process would be very convenient.

Participant
November 3, 2025

100% yes to all your suggestions!

Participant
October 29, 2025

I like it but I would like to see it cull duplicates for overshooters like myself.

Participant
November 3, 2025

Agreed, I want to get rid of the duplicates

Known Participant
October 28, 2025

The Assisted Culling feature is the best work done on Adobe in recent years.

For many reasons, mainly to do with the lack of stability, for Lightroom and Lightroom Mobile, I have been thinking of leaving Lightroom and Adobe for almost anything else.

A few days ago, I was part of a local camera club photo shoot with 14 models. I reloaded my 332 images, left after I did my normal manual first pass cull for obvious errors or as you now call them, misfires. The 285 images left took less than a minute for me to cull the rest for focus, and eye focus. To add or delete the remainder in all cases the reason "Assisted Culling" showed showed them as rejects was the models were wearing fluffy dresses. To get a better selection of images than my normal work flow, took less than 10 minutes going through the rejects one by one, and reorganizing my "album". 

For an "Early Access" product, this is as good as it needs to be - for me!

By the way in October 2019, Rbeecca Woiteshek and yourself helped me recover several thousand images from a trip to Italy, corrupted when I got caught between two  Lightroom software updates. I didn't ever recover all of the images, but Rebecca and you put a lot of time into the problem, and satisfied me you did what all that could be done.

Thanks for then and now,

 

Participant
October 29, 2025

Can you have a feature to automatically choose on each stack? Like a selection out of duplicate photos.

Participant
October 28, 2025

This feature is so welcome and helpful!  Thanks.  Upon first use, I didn't realize I'd begun an assited cull of my entire library rather than shots from one session, so I did look for a way to stop the cull.  It wasn't obvious to me where to find it, so I deselected all the boxes under Assisted Culling instead.  Might be helpful to have an easily accessible pause or cancel option.