Help Cull Photos

Help: Cull Photos

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.