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

Very cool concept. Most of my images were ‘rejected’ with the focus filter, despite the subject being tack sharp and shallow depth of field (sports photos). I also had it set to only ‘subject focus’ and one click above the midline. 

I like the idea of automated culling but when I tried it on my large collection of pictures of clouds at sunset it wanted to cull a lot of lovely photos. I think the program needs work.

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.

 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!

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.

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

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

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.

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!

• 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?