Help: Cull Photos (beta)

Beta feature. Culling results are useful as a starting point but should be treated as suggestions, not final decisions. Always review Picks and Reject Candidates before deleting anything. No photos are ever deleted automatically.

What the culling workflow does

The Cull Photos workflow groups similar photos (bursts and near-duplicates), ranks them using technical and face-aware metrics, and creates Lightroom collections so you can quickly review:

• Picks – best candidates per group
• Alternates – reasonable alternatives you might still keep
• Reject Candidates – clearly weaker shots
• optional Duplicates / Near Duplicates

No photos are deleted automatically. All results are non-destructive and shown via collections.

Prerequisites

• The backend server is running and reachable from Lightroom.
• The photos have been processed with Analyze & Index Photos so the backend has embeddings and culling metrics for them.

How to run culling

1. In Lightroom Classic, select the photos you want to cull or switch to a filtered view (for example a single shoot or folder).
2. Open the menu:
   Library -> Plug-in Extras -> Cull Similar Photos.
3. Choose:
   • Scope – Selected photos or Current view.
   • Preset – for example default or sports (tunes thresholds and weights).
4. Start the task and wait until the progress dialog completes.

The plugin calls the backend culling endpoint, which:

• groups photos into similarity clusters (single, burst, near_duplicate)
• scores each image per group
• selects winners, alternates, and reject candidates

Result collections in Lightroom

For each culling run, the plugin creates a new collection set:

• Name: Culling Results @ <timestamp>
• Contents:
  • Picks
  • Alternates
  • Reject Candidates
  • optional Duplicates / Near Duplicates

After creation, Lightroom automatically switches to the Picks collection inside that set so you can start your review immediately.

You can safely rename or move these collections later; they are standard Lightroom collections.

Understanding scores and explanations

For each photo, the backend stores culling-related fields such as:

• group information: cull_group_id, cull_group_type, cull_group_rank, cull_group_winner
• scores: cull_score, cull_sharpness, cull_face_score, cull_eye_openness, cull_blink_penalty, etc.
• explanations: cull_reason_codes, cull_explanation

The plugin writes a subset of these values into plugin-specific metadata fields on each photo so they can be inspected or used for diagnostics.

Typical reason codes include:

• sharpest_in_group
• blurred
• underexposed / overexposed
• best_face_quality / weak_face_quality
• eyes_open_best
• possible_blink
• near_duplicate_weaker

These help explain why a specific frame was chosen as a pick or flagged as a reject candidate.

Tips for best results

• Run culling after you have narrowed down an initial selection for a shoot (for example by folder or date range).
• Use Analyze & Index Photos with face detection enabled if you want face-aware ranking (eyes open, sharpness, occlusion).
• Start with conservative presets (default) and treat the result as a review aid, not an automatic delete list.