Lightroom Classic 15.4 Adds a Duplicate Finder and Smarter Group Culling

Lightroom Classic 15.4 shipped with a duplicate finder, improved AI masking, and smarter culling tools, and at least a few of these updates will change how you manage and edit images day to day. If your library has grown to tens of thousands of files, one of these features alone is worth knowing about.

Coming to you from Anthony Morganti, this practical video walks through the most useful updates in Lightroom Classic 15.4, and Morganti is upfront that nothing here is earthshattering, but a few things are genuinely useful. The biggest improvement is to subject and background masking. The AI that handles masking has gotten noticeably better at dealing with difficult edges, things like flyaway hair or thin spokes on a bicycle wheel, which used to cause visible errors. Morganti demonstrates both cases side by side, and the results around complex edges are cleaner than what older versions of the software produced. He also shows how the same improvement carries over to background masking, since both features share the same underlying technology.

The assisted culling update is the other change event shooters will notice immediately. Lightroom Classic can now detect closed eyes on people within group shots, which was a consistent weak point in earlier versions. Morganti tests this against his own family photos and group event images, and the feature correctly flags subjects with closed eyes, downcast eyes, or obscured eyes due to sunglasses. It isn't perfect in every frame, but it catches the clear misses that previously slipped through. If you regularly shoot events, weddings, or any situation where you're sorting through large sets of group images, this saves real time in the culling process.

The AI filter in the metadata panel is a smaller but useful addition. You can now search your library for images where AI tools were applied, including general AI edits, AI masking specifically, generative AI removal, and edits that may need an AI update. Morganti demonstrates this by filtering a collection and identifying which images had background masking applied and which had objects removed using the generative remove tool. It's a straightforward way to audit what's been done across a large library, especially if you've been using these tools across multiple sessions and lost track of which files were touched.

The duplicate finder is the feature Morganti calls the biggest addition in this release, and he walks through how it works in a library of over 11,000 files. Rather than matching by filename, it compares actual pixel data, which means it can catch duplicates even when files have been renamed. The video covers how to access the tool, how duplicates are grouped into stacks, and how the removal process works, including what the warning prompt tells you before anything gets deleted. Watch the video above for the full walkthrough from Morganti.