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

would love to use it but all it does is crash my computer. wasted hours trying to get it to work

Amazing concept. I wish it had worked, but my results were very poor. I tried both culling and stacking and both were poor. It selected misfires and missed terrific shots. It picked many shots with eyes closed after selecting eyes open. 

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.