For optimizing the optical system with liquid lenses, a new concept is proposed. Because liquid lenses have multiple discrete zoom locations, it is inevitable to select an initial solution for the damped least square algorithm (DLS) optimization process. The selection of the initial solution mostly depends on the experience of the designer. Thus different choices not only can bring the influence for different design processes, but also can bring difference in nature for the design results. To obtain a dynamic solution during the optimization process, an improved tabu search (ITS) algorithm with the DLS is proposed. The results show that automatic selection of zoom positions makes imaging effect better.