Avoiding Vanilla - Culling Your Photographs in the Age of AI

In school marketing photography, authenticity matters more than perfection. But with AI tools now choosing our “best” shots, are we at risk of losing the very moments that make our images feel real?

There’s a disturbance in the force in right now, and it’s changing and challenging how we all work as photographers. More and more editing platforms, from Lightroom’s new AI-assisted culling tools to apps like AfterShoot, Narrative Select, and Imagen AI, promise to sort, select, and even pre-edit your images automatically. For anyone under pressure to deliver quickly, it sounds ideal. But as someone who learned photography in the darkroom, cutting contact sheets and making decisions frame by frame, I find it a little unnerving. These tools don’t just clean up noise or remove distractions; they’re now deciding which images are “keepers”.

And that changes everything.

Because when AI starts culling my images, I risk losing the individuality in my storytelling. The result will be a 'vanilla aesthetic' — technically perfect, algorithmically pleasing, and emotionally flat. I’ve tested this on a couple of recent school shoots, culling and editing entirely within Lightroom. The results were interesting, but also revealing. I used the AI culling tool to reject images where: a) eyes weren’t open, b) eyes weren’t focused, or c) the subject itself wasn’t in focus.

It did OK, but it also removed a considerable number of images I would normally deliver. Students looking down while working were rejected automatically. When I deliberately pulled focus to highlight a student in the background or text in a book, Lightroom assumed it was a mistake. Some frames disappeared for reasons best known to the algorithm. It seemed to favour clean, straightforward portraits or unobstructed images - anything nuanced or intentional, such as motion blur or shooting through a football net for context, is marked as a fail with a red cross. In short, it prefers clarity over character.

I see this being an issue not only in school marketing photography but, any type of photography where authenticity and 'feel' is everything. The best images aren’t the flawless ones; they’re the ones that feel real: a moment of connection between teacher and student, the nervous smile before a performance, the unguarded laughter on sports day. Those are the frames that tell a school’s story. AI can help with the housekeeping, but it shouldn’t be making the creative calls. The challenge for photographers now is to stay more human than the software, to hold onto the intent that makes an image ours, and to keep shooting with that intention rather than just efficiency.

There may be plenty I can improve upon or change in my photography, but being vanilla isn't one of them. Neither should it be.