It’s the part of the job nobody talks about. Not the shoot, not the creative edit, but the digital grunt work. The hours spent staring at a screen, culling a wedding gallery from 4,000 shots down to 400. It’s a necessary evil, a tax on our time that we’ve all just come to accept. Or at least, we did.

For a catalog of 25,000 images, the new duplicate scan can finish in as little as five minutes. That’s a massive win.

The Duplicate Finder: Finally, a Cure for Catalog Bloat

Let’s be blunt. Over 15+ years in this business, my Lightroom catalog has become a digital graveyard of redundant files. Imports that failed and were restarted, folders moved and re-linked, backups of backups—it’s a mess. Software has existed to fix this, but having a native tool that understands the catalog is a completely different story.

What makes this one work is that it’s not looking at filenames. It’s looking at the actual pixel data. This means it finds the identical shot you renamed “CLIENT-FINAL-v2.jpg” and the original “_DSC8834.NEF” and knows they’re the same image.

The workflow is simple:

• You enable it in Catalog Settings under the Metadata tab.
• Lightroom scans your library and groups all exact duplicates into stacks.
• You get the option to either remove the duplicates from the catalog (keeping the file on disk) or delete them permanently.

My advice? Create a collection of the duplicates before you hit delete. Just in case. But for the first time, cleaning up years of digital clutter feels manageable, not like a project that requires a week off.

Is Assisted Culling Finally Smart Enough for Group Photos?

I am deeply skeptical of AI in art. I’ve said before that I think most of it is just more subscription bloat. But this isn’t AI creating art; it’s AI doing the tedious work a human has to do anyway. And that’s a distinction that matters.

The big test for any culling tool has always been the group shot. The dreaded 20-person family formal where you took 50 frames hoping to get one where everyone’s eyes are open. Manually checking every face, frame by frame, is a nightmare.

The new Assisted Culling, now officially out of early access, finally seems to get this right. The key upgrade is a new “Faces” panel that specifically analyzes people in group photos. It gives you scores for “Eye Focus” and, crucially, “Eyes Open.” It can even detect downcast eyes or eyes hidden by sunglasses, which older versions were useless at.

Instead of just sorting by some vague “aesthetic” score, you can now instantly see the three frames where everyone looks good. It allows you to automatically flag or reject shots, saving a massive amount of initial filtering time. For wedding and event photographers, this is the single most important update to Lightroom in years. It gives you back your time.

The Other Upgrades That Actually Matter

• Improved AI Masking: Select Subject is noticeably better. I’ve been playing with it on some portraits with flyaway hair, and the precision is much cleaner. It means less time spent manually refining masks with a brush.
• Faster Denoise: Adobe claims a 50% speed boost for Denoise on Apple Silicon. When I’m processing high-ISO files from a dark concert venue shot on my Nikon Z6 III, any reduction in that processing time is welcome.
• Keyword Syncing: Finally. Keywords now sync properly across the entire ecosystem (desktop, mobile, web). A basic organizational feature that should have been there years ago, but I’m glad it’s here now. You can find more details on the full release notes on Adobe’s official site.

Just be aware, this update requires a one-time catalog upgrade. As always, it creates a copy, so your original catalog is safe, but it’s something to plan for when you first launch the new version.

The Bottom Line

• This is the right way to use AI. It’s not generating fake images; it’s a powerful assistant that handles the mind-numbing, repetitive tasks that burn us out, freeing us up for the creative work.
• The Duplicate Finder is an essential, long-overdue utility. Every photographer with a catalog more than a year old needs to run this immediately to reclaim disk space and reduce clutter.
• For high-volume shooters—events, weddings, sports—the enhanced Assisted Culling isn’t just an improvement; it’s a fundamental change to the economics of your time. It will make your entire post-production process faster.