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Rikk Flohr_Photography
Community Manager
September 24, 2025
Question

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

  • September 24, 2025
  • 71 replies
  • 7468 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 

71 replies

jbc2
Participant
October 30, 2025

If I have a photo with multiple birds, it seems to have trouble determining what the "subject" is.  If the birds in the background are blurred, but the subject bird in the front is in focus, it still rejects the image, saying "the subject appears to be out of focus".  It would be nice to have an option to see what it thought the subject was and possibly correct it.

 

I have some images where the bird is in focus, but the head is turned away.  Even when I select "eye focus", it selects the image rather than rejecting it.  If it doesn't detect eyes, it seems to just ignore that setting (eye focus) rather than rejecting the photo.  Is it meant to work that way?

 

Also, I would love to have a "filter" for the folder, so I could tell it to only cull raw photos or only cull photos taken on this date.

Victoria Bampton LR Queen
Community Expert
Community Expert
October 30, 2025

@jbc2 The Subject and Eye models are currently trained on people, so they won't work well with birds. Hopefully that can be added in the future, but in the meantime, just skip those checkboxes on bird photos.

Victoria - The Lightroom Queen
Participant
October 30, 2025

A great new feature, which will take a lot of work in the image selection.

 

What would definitely be desirable is a search for pictures with certain motifs. Similar to a keyword search, only that no keywords were entered beforehand and Lightroom assigns them on the basis of the photos themselves

Participant
October 30, 2025

Cool feature, ran into a few bugs (videos attached)

1. When doing batch actions, even if I don't have any flag change selected, I *sometimes* get a dialog confirming that flags will be added to x photos. 
2. When in the culling state, I'd like to view the rating/finding for each picture, but I find that when I hover over the red x, the text will pop up and disappear almost immediately. 


Participant
October 30, 2025

How do you get this obnoxious "culling score" etc off my program.  It is awful

 

Victoria Bampton LR Queen
Community Expert
Community Expert
October 30, 2025

@NHMOONEY Assuming you're using Lightroom Desktop (as you're in the Cloud forum), simply close the  Assisted Culling panel on the left panel group.

Victoria - The Lightroom Queen
Participant
November 1, 2025
Actually I am using Classic
Participating Frequently
October 29, 2025

Consider to create subfolders, in the parent folder, for Selects and Rejects, which is what I do manually.

I select all Picks or Rejects and create a subfolder including all selected photo in a subfolder named Selects and one for Rejects. 

Once the "best" editing is completed I move them, rated 5 star, to the parent folder and would like to add a Green lable to the parent folder.

Inspiring
October 29, 2025
  • Permit us to adjust the width of the Info Panel (I) like we can adjust the with the Photos Panel (P). 
  • Add a "Copy Photos to Clipboard" option in the right-click menu of the filmstrip so we may copy selected local photos to the clipboard for pasting elsewhere (like "Copy" in the Adobe Bridge filmstrip)
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.