Legend

Open for Voting

P: Stacking in folders and collections should be global

Forum|Forum|15 years ago
April 2, 2011
88 replies
3779 views

Stacks should be handled uniformly, regardless of the source selected. As it stands, stacks are second-class citizens in Lightroom.

* Currently, photos in different folders can’t be stacked. This restriction forces users to be aware of which folder a photo resides in, which goes against the mainstream digital-asset-management philosophy of hiding folder locations. I don’t know of any use-case justifying this restriction.

* Stacking isn’t displayed when viewing collections and smart collections. This is especially annoying when viewing smart collections, since smart collections are the only way to do advanced searching. It would be better if stacks were viewable within collections just as they are within folders and with filtering – when more than one photo in a stack is part of a collection, then the stack could be collapsed or expanded, but only the photos in the collection will be shown. This is the way stacks work now with filtering, so extending this to collections would be consistent. Users who don’t want to see stacking in collections could simply invoke Expand All Stacks.

* And of course, you should be able to stack and unstack photos when viewing a collection.

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Antoine HLMN

Known Participant

So how do I get in the same collection, stacks from different folders ?

Antoine HLMN

Known Participant

Ok, here's what I figured out:

Stacks are preserved when the folder is dragged to create a collection.
Stacks collapsed, only the top of the stacks is copied
Stacks expanded, all the images are copied, but the stack info is missing

john beardsworth

Community Expert

No, it is not a bug. It is a feature which gives you the flexibility of having photos stacked differently in different places. So in collection 1 which I set up for a slideshow presentation, a stack can contain images x y z a b c, while z a b are also in a stack in collection 2 which is for a book, while in the folders none of those stacked. Previously, flags behaved similarly, and the per-folder/collection stacking was introduced when Adobe made flags global.

You can replicate a folder's stacks in a collection by dragging the folder and dropping it in Collections.

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

It's not a bug, because it's as designed. Except it's designed badly.

-- Johan W. Elzenga

Antoine HLMN

Known Participant

Same issue here: I created a ton of stacks in the folders where the images are in. Now I copied those images in collections and ... stacks are gone! What an annoying bug 😞

SteddyShots

Known Participant

Very odd that you still cannot stack items from different folders. Most set folders to be by year, month and day. So say you are shooting a series of photos at night time around midnight. Some photos will be in one folder for one day, and ones taking seconds later after midnight will be in the second day folder, and you can't stack them which seems quite odd.

johnrellisAuthor

Legend

"use the text filter and select Keywords in the first box, and contains,contains all, or starts with in the 2nd box and 'Birds" in the 3rd box"

Unfortunately, depending on the keyword hierarchy, that can often produce false matches. For example, "Keywords contains words birds" would match the keyword "blue birds". And "Keywords start with birds" would match the keywords "blue birds" and "birdseed"".

(The lack of exact match for keywords and other fields is another design wart.)

Califdan2

Inspiring

another time saver when using keywords and filters is to use a Text filter rather than a metadata filter. For example, rather than selecting "Birds" in the metadata filter column called Keywords, use the text filter and select Keywords in the first box, and contains,contains all, or starts with in the 2nd box and 'Birds" in the 3rd box. then when you want to switch to "Fish" just type 'Fish" right over "Birds" in that 3rd box.

R

Ralph Hill

Participating Frequently

Thanks for the suggestion John. Saving library filter presets helps. This is not something l had looked at. One issue is that the presets change everything. So, if you are working on 4 star birds and want to switch to 4 star mammals, you have to select the filter preset then the star level (unless you have saved presets for every combination you might want) and perhaps also flags, possibly change the sort order and then try to remember what images you were looking at last. So, yes, you can get to the collection of images you want with a handful of clicks, but you have lost all the context from the last time you were looking at this collection. A bit better than nothing, but not a good solution for the work I do.

johnrellisAuthor

Legend

"named filters so I could quickly jump say, from mammals to birds to pictures from days 3."

To be precise about terminology, Library filters are a different beast from smart collections, and you can do some of what you want to do with filters. For example, you could define filter presets to show photos with the keyword Birds or Mammals:

An advantage of filters is that they can be applied to the currently selected source (e.g. a folder or collection), whereas smart collections cannot (there is a clumsy workaround). A disadvantage of filters is that they do not support all the criteria that smart collections do (another design wart). For example, while filters let you (somewhat clumsily) filter by date, you can't easily do "capture date in the last 3 days", as you can with smart collections.

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