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

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

Introducing Assisted Culling (Early Access) in Lightroom Desktop 

For providing feedback for Lightroom Classic, click here.

We’re excited to share an early look at Assisted Culling, an AI-powered workflow that helps photographers quickly review large photo sets and select the best shots with confidence. 

What is Assisted Culling? 
Assisted Culling is one of the most requested features from advanced photographers, consistently topping feedback at customer events. It streamlines the process of identifying top photo selects from large sets—hundreds or even thousands—based on attributes like eye openness, sharpness, and more. 

Assisted Culling saves photographers countless hours of manual review, letting them focus on creativity instead of sorting. 

• Eyes Open – Detects whether subjects’ eyes are open. 

• Eye Focus – Measures the sharpness of the eyes. 

• Subject Focus – Evaluates overall clarity. 

• Clean Up – Identifies likely rejects (e.g., blurs, misfires, exposure issues). 

• Stacks – Groups images either by visual similarity or time for easier selection. 

Why Early Access? 
Assisted Culling launches as Early Access at MAX 2025 with a narrow, high-confidence scope prioritizing portraits and headshots. This focused approach ensures reliability for these scenarios while we gather feedback and iterate. From here, we’ll expand to broader use cases like weddings and events before GA. 

How to Try It: 

• Open Lightroom Desktop. 

• Find Assisted Culling in the left photo panel. 

• Select your criteria, adjust the settings, and apply batch actions, such as flagging selects or deleting rejects. 

FAQs 

• Q: Where is Assisted Culling available? 
  A: Lightroom Desktop and Lightroom Classic as part of the MAX 2025 release. 
• Q: How fast is it? 
  A: Our testing shows an average of 0.18 seconds per photo on modern devices (≈2000 photos in 8 minutes). 
• Q: What kinds of photos work best today? 
  A: Individual portraits and headshots. 
• Q: Do I need to pay extra? 
  A: No. Assisted Culling is included in your existing Lightroom subscription. 

Giving Feedback: 

Please share your experience in this thread. Include: 

• App version/platform 

• System details 

• Example images (optional) 

 
Your feedback helps us refine our models and user experience. 

Lisa Ngo / Kwamina Arthur – Product Managers, Lightroom 

Posted by:

[ahm3441]

This feature is so welcome and helpful!  Thanks.  Upon first use, I didn't realize I'd begun an assited cull of my entire library rather than shots from one session, so I did look for a way to stop the cull.  It wasn't obvious to me where to find it, so I deselected all the boxes under Assisted Culling instead.  Might be helpful to have an easily accessible pause or cancel option.

[crusted]

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,

[James35676767kavt]

Can you have a feature to automatically choose on each stack? Like a selection out of duplicate photos.

[HAYLEESUECREATIONS]

I like it but I would like to see it cull duplicates for overshooters like myself.

[Amanda Florio Photography]

Agreed, I want to get rid of the duplicates

[Chr__Au]

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.

[bhorne]

100% yes to all your suggestions!

[Hydro Adventurer]

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)

[jhgfuoipdfg8oi35njker8]

• 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)

[LarryK41]

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.

[NHMOONEY]

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

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

@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.

[NHMOONEY]

Actually I am using Classic

[Duncanma]

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. 

[Die Fotoschmiede]

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

[jbc2]

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]

@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.

[farahstop]

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]

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

[farahstop]

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? 

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

@farahstop  thank you for the feedback. Currently, the only place to do a "pre-import" cull is in Lightroom Classic.  We will look into adding this to the LrD feature set in future. 

[farahstop]

Please do. Many of are CC based for different reasons, yet equally financially invested in adobe. Assisted culling is not usable to us in its current form.  

[cmecatchu2]

There needs to be a way to filter action in the culling where you would want the blur at times... even at a lower sharp setting its rejecting ones that are sharp in face but have the motion blur.  I can see this being helpful in certain situations not all culling. but it is a nice start. 

[isabella_0105]

Such an amazing and time saving tool! I love this feature, but I’m having a little trouble and I'm not sure if it’s user error. I have about 1,000 photos, so I’m not sure if that’s too many at once. The first time I culled them, it completed about one-third and then force-closed the whole app. When I reopened it, I had to re-enter my criteria. This time it finished culling, and at first I could view the selected photos in Develop. But after closing my laptop and coming back, all the photos appear to have been “unculled.”