P: Better auto stacking for bracketing, HDR, Focus Stacking and Panoramas

yes, stack by number of images would help many users who use any sort of normal bracketing mode which will  always give the same 3, 5, 7, or 9 shot sequence, or panorama with a proper pano head, this is far more common use case especially for lage projects than shooting a random number of images per sequence and later wanting to stack by time interval 

Stack by number of exposures - is the best option!

In PTGui, it's been there since the beginning and it works great. Why has this not been in LR for so long?

as the stacking of large image series in current LR (v11.5, i'm not using v12 yet as i still have to stick with mac os catalina) is still limited to manual selection and timebased intervals i like to add my upvote this thread.

i second the feature request for introducing a simple stacking by a certain number of images in a stack mentioned several times in this thread very much!

with 20+ years experience in professional hdr 360° panorama production stacking by number of images in a stack is by far the most effective, simple and safe method.

when i'm capturing large projects with a nearly fully automated workflow (e.g. robotic panorama head with exposure measurement > lightroom pre production > batch project building and batch stitching with ptgui) i'm talking about 1000s of images which need to be treated unattended throughout the workflow.

i like the HDR DNG look LR produces more than photomatix styles or PTGuis built-in HDR and fusion functions, but the unreliable stacking by capture time is a show stopper here, especially when longer exposure times in dark rooms are getting longer than the intervals between the bracketing series themselves.

Hi, since automatic stacking by capture time doesn't work with long exposure bracketing shots at different time intervals to make HDR Merging, I'd like to propose a much simpler method for quickly making stacks of the same number of images - Grouping after a certain number of photos in order.

This will definitely make batch processing much easier and faster and I'm sure many HDR-ers would be happy with it.

Please vote 🙂

Currently the only way I see to auto stack photos for HDR merging is by capture time - and this doesn't always work as sometimes the longest exposure is longer than the time between AEB bursts.

A much easier and more helpful feature that would be used by many thousands of HDR photographers would be an option to stack or even just go ahead and merge every 3, 5, or 7 photos.

I would imagine this would be very simple code and make many thousands of photographers very happy and save us all a lot of time.

I can only imagine that this isn't already a feature because the developers don't realize how many users would want this.

I add my vote to this 11 year old request. In 2022, there MUST be a better way to autostack images. By knowing a DSLR burst rate, by detecting bracketed images, by AI on panoramas or HDR, based on similar content... Make Snesei useseful

I would still love to see the ability to stack by number of exposures. I pretty much always shoot 5 bracketed exposures, and all I need is to stack by fives. "Auto-stack by capture time" kinda works, most of the time, but if I'm shooting in a darker environment, that can throw off the capture time significantly. If I'm working with undreds of exposures, it's a pain to try to hunt down the incorrectly stakced images.

Seems like something simple enough to be able to implement, to stack by whatever number you'd like to stack by.

Hello.
"Stacking by time" is a great feature, but many times, it is failing.
The problem is: when you shoot exposure bracketing for HDR composing, the time between shots in sequences may vary, and it may be longer than the time between different shoots. A vivid example: you do a real estate bracketing shoot. In a bright room, the sequence duration will be very short, and the sequence duration in a dark basement will be very, very long. Same time, an interval between two sequences taken in the same room, just with a different angle, may be a split second. It makes auto stacking nearly impossible.
But the number of pictures in each sequence will always be the same - 3, or 5, or whatever you set. So, why not allow to set auto stacking by this number? "Stack sequences by 3, 5, 7 pictures", and it will work in any situation when you use auto bracketing!

Adobe Lightroom Classinc currently supports two modes of blending photos. Either blending multiple exposures into an HDR image or sitching multiple images into a single panorama. It would be so so so so nice if it was possible to perform the blending for focus stacking multiple image into one image in the same way, with the output being a DNG file, without having to open photoshop.