Autophagy is a process that targets intracellular elements for degradation by sequestering them in double-membrane autophagosomes which then fuse with late endosomes/lysosomes forming degradative autolysomes. Autophagy can be associated with the engulfment of bulk cytosolic components, thereby being non-selective, which occurs for instance in response to starvation and is commonly referred to as bulk or non-selective autophagy. By contrast, selective autophagy has specific targets, such as damaged organelles (mitophagy, lysophagy, ER-phagy, ribophagy), aggregate proteins (aggrephagy) or invading bacteria (xenophagy), thereby being importantly involved in cellular quality control. Hence, not surprisingly, insufficiency of selective autophagy pathways has been associated with various human pathologies, prominently including neurodegeneration and infection. Determination of cargo specificity has been attributed to selective autophagy receptors such as p62, NBR1, OPTN, NDP52, which can both bind the cargo and ubiquitin simultaneously to initiate pathways leading to autophagosome membrane recruitment. In recent years a considerable progress has been made in understanding mechanisms governing selective cargo engulfment, which opens up the possibilities of enhancing selective autophagy pathways to boost cellular quality control capabilities and alleviate pathology.