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

Rikk Flohr_Photography

Answered

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

Forum|Forum|9 months ago
September 24, 2025
82 replies
9339 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

Feedback

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer Rikk Flohr_Photography

This topic is now closed. Thank you for your feedback.

The New feedback thread, effective with 15.4, is being collected at: https://community.adobe.com/questions-680/assisted-culling-feedback-thread-lrd-1627465

Show previous replies

F

farahstop

Participating Frequently

I use LRcc and I don't want to import the images if I haven't culled them first. That is why I use other non adobe software. Can I cull without saving the images first? I don't want to upload 1k photos if I don't have to. I would like to select prior to importing to LR. Am I missing how it's done?

Victoria Bampton LR Queen

Community Expert

@farahstop you can use Assisted Culling in Local mode, and then just copy your selects to the cloud.

Victoria - The Lightroom Queen

F

farahstop

Participating Frequently

I understand the Local part, however, must we be obligated to save the images from the SD card to your drive in order to use assisted culling? So far per the vid by LR by Brian Matiash and Adobe, you put the sd card in, select, save on the computer... I don't want to do that. I would like for it to operate like other third party software where you can cull on the SD card directly, select and then dump in Lr CC. Are there any other steps we can take to avoid this data dumping all over?

jbc2

Participant

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

@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

D

Die Fotoschmiede

Participant

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

D

Duncanma

Participant

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.

Lightroom_2025-10-29_19-32-58.zip

Lightroom_2025-10-29_19-29-59.zip

N

NHMOONEY

Participant

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

Victoria Bampton LR Queen

Community Expert

@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

N

NHMOONEY

Participant

Actually I am using Classic

L

LarryK41

Participating Frequently

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.

J

jhgfuoipdfg8oi35njker8

Inspiring

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)

H

Hydro Adventurer

Participant

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)

C

Chr__Au

Participant

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.