P: Lightroom: consolidate/flatten/merge history steps

This plugin allows users to consolidate and/or delete edit history steps:

DevHistoryEditor

I like the idea of some form of hierachy to group & optionally hide small sequential adjustments of the same tool.

It is also confusing to have develop history of a photo merged with navigation steps in the product. The history of each photo should be independent.

I had proposed a "collapsed" or "essential" edit history before. That feature request distinguished between "chronological" and "essential" views of history steps. If both views were available, I believe everyone in this thread would be pleased.

I think there is some good discussion about potential features (such as optional timestamps) in this thread.

Allow users to select a set of histories and right-click > "Collapse". That way, is I have a dozen or two "Add Brush Stroke" for a single mask, I can collapse them into 1. If the user should want, there should be an "Expand" option, too.

I proposed a similar idea giving the user the option to look at a collapsed history. The idea is to allow both a chronological view (current) and an "essential/logical" view on the history.

I believe there is value in supporting multiple views on the edit history. The chronological (current) one is good for retrospective retracing of the history of edits. It is not good for providing access to (and allowing modification of) edit actions for future editing. The latter is better supported by a logical ordering which is usefully combined with a collapsing of edits to logical groups (e.g., combining brush strokes to the masks/edit-pins they belong to) and potentially even elimination (e.g., of back and forth fiddling with with certain sliders).

That's not complete enough for my tastes -- if I make some other change between crop adjustments, then I have two crop adjustments in the list, which I'd prefer not to have.

That's not complete enough for my tastes -- if I make some other change between crop adjustments, then I have two crop adjustments in the list, which I'd prefer not to have.

Consolidating them for display only is a clever idea. It would meet my need.

Consolidating them for display only is a clever idea. It would meet my need.

I'd merge the individual brush strokes to the mask displayed with the associated pin - again, it's the resultant mask I care about, not the stokes made to create it.

Slightly simpler with grads in the sense that each grad would remain discrete, but any adjustments to the effect applied would be consolidated to a single change (as if the adjustments had be set before applying the grad and it had been applied in its final location/width/etc)