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Rikk Flohr_Photography
Community Manager
September 24, 2025
Question

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

  • September 24, 2025
  • 77 replies
  • 8199 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

Participant
November 7, 2025

please make a version by which it will automatically choose between similar images. stacking is not doing it yet.

 

Participant
November 6, 2025

SO excited for the new feature! What would be really helpful it to be also to do assited culling on PARTS of a whole gallery. With bad wifi or low ram it can take a long time to run and to be able to use it in the places it would save me the most time would be really helpful. Also a pause, stop and save button would be really helpful.

 

Participant
November 6, 2025

I’m thrilled to have this feature now! I’ve been hoping for it.

 

I’d like to give some feedback on this feature. As a multipurpose photographer who also uses my photos for graphic design, I often need to find specific car photos. However, I don’t have enough time to organize over 200 race cars into separate files. It would be great if I could organize photos by their numbers displayed on the side of the car, or if there’s a feature that allows me to highlight specific areas and then create stacks from the search results.

 

Thank you to everyone who works hard to make this program user-friendly! 

Participant
November 6, 2025

Love the idea of making culling quicker! However upon first use, I ran into an issue with the batch action option. I selected a specific album and began culling (eyes open filter didnt' seem to work very well and missed some obviously closed eyes in single person portraits, but I didn't see an option to mark it as incorrect, just to mark it as a reject). I'd gotten to a point I was happy with, then selected batch option to rate all the selects as having a ranking of 5 stars (this is how I organize in-album). When I then navigated to the album later, it had not marked the selects as 5 stars and I had to start over again, just doubling my culling time (sobbing!). Love this concept, but deeeeefinitely keep tweaking it. Thanks!

Participant
November 6, 2025

Need an obvious way to stop the culling process.. 

Rikk Flohr_Photography
Community Manager
November 6, 2025

@JulianShay 
Uncheck the criteria box
or

Close the Assisted Culling Panel

or

Switch to another Album

 

Any of these will suspend the Culling operation in process. 

Rikk Flohr: Adobe Photography Org
Participant
November 5, 2025

As a high-volume sports shooter, I’m genuinely disappointed that Adobe engineers could not implement a simple AI-assisted "ball-in-frame" detection feature and be the first to do so. 

 

When you look at the photographers who cull the most images, two groups stand out immediately, wedding and sports photographers. Seeing the below comment about culling 300 images is laughable to those of us who regularly cull 5000+ after a normal Tuesday.  Sports photographers, in particular, rely on burst shooting to capture the split second where the athlete, the motion, and the ball align perfectly.

 

The fact Adobe engineers hadn't figured or didn't prioritize an AI scan of images for a ball is wild to me.  The first major platform to that party, whether Aftershoot, PhotoMechanic, Imagen, Adobe, etc.....will dominate sports photography photo processing for at least the foresable future. Adobe might even win some customers they've lost form their constant price increases.  

 

Here are a few things for Adobe engineers to consider as to why to prioritze this feature moving forward:

  • A modern sports camera can shoot 30–40 frames per second (not including the A9iii global shutter of 100+)

  • Out of a 10-second play, you may have hundreds of frames with only a handful that actually include the ball.

  • Manually culling those frames is extremely time-consuming and easily automated with AI because surely AI knows how to spot a ball right? 

This is not a complex ask. Adobe already has object detection in Lightroom and Photoshop for people, skies, backgrounds and now things like reflections. Extending that detection to identify “ball-in-frame” specifcally in this new culling feature would be an immense productivity upgrade. 

 

Frankly, it’s surprising Adobe hasn’t already prioritized this, especially given the recent price increases. Features like this are exactly what justify the continued loyalty of high-volume professionals. 

 

Adobe engineers,  add a “Ball-in-Frame” AI filter to this culling feature in the next update please! It would not only save countless hours for sports photographers worldwide but also reaffirm Adobe’s commitment to innovation and responsiveness to the real-world needs of its users.

Participant
November 4, 2025

Mac user here.
I've just updated, and unfortunately the Assisted Culling is not working at all. I have the folder selected with 200 images, side panel is open with criteria for selection and rejection ticked. It analyses the images, then nothing. Auto stacking does the same, I select to 'stack by virtual similarity', and it does absolutely nothing. Any suggestions, what could be wrong?

Julie k
Participating Frequently
November 5, 2025

Aliz_, that's puzzling. I will reach out to you privately to try and figure out what's going wrong for you.

Participant
November 4, 2025

Well I think it is a brilliant first step filter to reassure yourself that your people shots were good enough for final choice by your brain and eyes!

Thank you!

 

 

Known Participant
November 4, 2025
Absolutely agree.

A great first step, and a great tool for double checking your own review and efforts.


Christopher Rusted
Participant
November 2, 2025

Fun idea, but it doesn't work. I think it ignored my selections when I told it just to look for misfires and decided to look for all the possible checkboxes (focus issues maybe). Anyway none of the shots it chose were misfires. They were straight down drone shots for a real estate propery asisgnment I did a couple years ago. And I'm pretty sure there ARE some misfires in my library, since I backup all of my originals to Lightroom.  So make it do as it's told and we will all get along just fine?

Participant
November 2, 2025

Wow, another button in the left column 🤦‍♂

 

Please give us an option to manage which buttons (Add Photos, Assisted Culling, Learn, Community, All Photos and suboptions) are shown in the left column and in which order, because -honestly- I never use anything but my own albums/folders and sometimes some 'All Photos' and two of its suboptions, and I hate having to scroll down for my own stuff, while some (to me) useless buttons take up space at the top.