How to Use Assisted Culling and Auto-Stacking in Lightroom Classic 15 (Save Hours Editing)

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How to Use Assisted Culling and Auto-Stacking

Lightroom Classic 15 introduces powerful AI workflow upgrades with Assisted Culling and Auto-Stacking. Discover how to use these new tools to organize thousands of photos in minutes — perfect for wedding, portrait, and event photographers.

🧩 Introduction

If you’re a photographer who shoots hundreds or even thousands of photos during a session — weddings, portraits, or events — you know how time-consuming culling can be.
The Lightroom Classic 15 (2026 October Update) introduces two AI-driven tools to make this process faster and smarter: Assisted Culling and Auto-Stacking.

In this tutorial, we’ll walk through how each works and how you can integrate them into your workflow to save hours of editing time.

🧠 What Is Assisted Culling?

Assisted Culling uses Adobe’s AI to analyze your images and help pick the best ones automatically while rejecting others.
This feature works especially well for portraits and people-based photos, identifying shots where subjects are in focus, eyes are open, and expressions look natural.

Before using it, make sure it’s enabled under:
Catalog Settings → Metadata → Assisted Culling → “Analyze photos of selected source when Assisted Culling panel is open.”

⚙️ How to Use the Assisted Culling Panel

Go to the Library Module, open your photo collection, and look for the Assisted Culling section under Early Access.

You’ll see options for:

  • ✅ Select Criteria: Focus, Eyes Open, Eye Focus
  • ❌ Reject Criteria: Misfires, Exposure Issues, Subject Out of Focus
  • 👀 View Panel: Displays your current Selects and Rejects
  • 🗂️ Organize Results: Batch operations to label, flag, or rate photos

Lightroom automatically assigns a Culling Score to each image, ranking them by focus and eye detection. You can fine-tune results by adjusting the focus score slider (for example, increasing from 50 to 90 for sharper photos).

🎯 Overriding AI Decisions

Lightroom’s AI is smart — but not perfect.
You might find images that technically fail focus checks but are still artistically valuable. Simply right-click and choose Mark as Select to override any reject.

⚡ Batch Actions & Organization

Once your selects and rejects are ready, use the Organized Results section to apply batch edits:

  • ✅ Apply color labels (Green for selects, Red for rejects)
  • ⭐ Apply star ratings (5 stars for selects, 1 star for rejects)
  • 📂 Add to or remove from collections

This automation ensures your library stays consistent and saves time managing thousands of photos.

🧩 What Is Auto-Stacking?

After culling, Auto-Stacking helps group similar images.
You can stack photos either:

  1. By Time — Groups images taken within a set timeframe (e.g., 1 minute apart).
  2. By Visual Similarity (AI-Powered) — Uses machine learning to analyze composition and group similar shots.

This is perfect for burst sequences, outfit changes, or repeated poses.

🔍 Using Auto-Stacking

  • Open your library collection and click Auto-Stack.
  • Choose Visual Similarity and adjust the slider for stricter or looser grouping.
  • Lightroom previews how many stacks it will create before you confirm.
  • Click Stack to finalize groups.

Each stack displays a small badge; click it to expand or collapse the group. The first image is typically Lightroom’s AI-selected “best” frame.

💡 Real-World Workflow Example

Let’s say you shot a portrait session with multiple outfit changes.
Auto-Stacking groups similar looks, and Assisted Culling flags the best shots automatically. Combine both features to:

  • Instantly identify best takes
  • Remove misfires
  • Organize by pose or outfit
  • Reduce your editing set from thousands to a few hundred top shots

🎬 Conclusion

The Assisted Culling and Auto-Stacking tools in Lightroom Classic 15 represent major leaps in AI-assisted workflows.
If you’re a high-volume photographer, these tools can help you spend less time sorting and more time editing your best work.

👉 If you found this helpful, check out my full YouTube tutorial on these features and subscribe for more Lightroom and Photoshop deep dives.

See my previous blog article here ➡️ How to Turn a Photo Black and White in Photoshop (Easiest Method)

See Adobe website here ➡️ https://www.adobe.com/home