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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Ralph Hill

Participating Frequently

I am currently running 2015.3 under OS X 10.11.5.

Stacking, as it exists, does not meet my needs even at the most rudimentary level. The design of the interaction among stacks, folders and collections seems fundamentally flawed. In my opinion, a blank-paper redesign is need. If the current system is too deeply ingrained into the system, then come up with something new. Call it grouping. That would work for me. Just give me something that works across folders and collections (including smart collections).

Declaration of Bias: I was, and still am, an Aperture user. I am hoping for something better than Aperture to replace Aperture. So far as I can tell, Lightroom is not the the application that I am looking for.

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GeoffVane

Inspiring

About the collection solution:
Sorry but they need to sit stacked in a main folder. The subfolders have to be stacked. A collection works for a subject where the folder isn't important and I use collections for that already, but we work with dated folders that contain too many images in subfolders.

G

GeoffVane

Inspiring

Stacking beyond a folder and collecting beyond a folder is needed a.s.a.p. It has been asked at least 5 years ago so hurry.

johnrellisAuthor

Legend

"John, I didn't mention all the various ways I've come to rely on stacks being global in my workflow. Finding workarounds for every single case will be really annoying. "

Much as I dislike the current stacking design, I think it is unlikely that it will change after all these years. So you have the difficult choice of adapting your workflow or using a different app. In Lightroom, keywords can work more smoothly than collections in many instances.

john beardsworth

Community Expert

It's not many people over 5 years, and what you don't see is how welcome it was to get local stacks when Lr4 was released.

If it matters to you that images aren't in any collection, just create a smart collection using collection name / doesn't contain / a e i o u.

J

joshanon

Participating Frequently

I do have the Folders panel hidden, but unless you're very careful when importing new images (either making sure to click Add to Collection or immediately making a new collection from Previous Import) and careful when deleting images, it's easy to end up with images in the catalog not in any collection. If you have 100 images, no biggie. But when you have tens of thousands...

Reading through this thread, it seems like while local stacks might be great for your workflow, they confuse a lot of people beyond me. If I edit an image externally or make a virtual copy, I want an easy way for that group of images to travel together between collections. Stacks could give that to me. Currently they don't.

john beardsworth

Community Expert

No, I'm not turning it into an Aperture v Lightroom debate, but correcting your assertions. Lightroom doesn't continue Bridge's method at all (and who cares about Bridge anyway?) as Lightroom's Folders are drawn from the database, not Finder/Explorer. Aperture was an exception among DAMs in hiding folder locations and only allowing virtual organization in its main UI. But if you prefer it, just hide the Folders panel.

Similarly, by offering local stacks Lightroom provides more flexibility than a simple global stack, so you can have the same image stacked differently in different contexts. Stacking is used in too many ways for another app's metaphors to be imposed.

RikkFlohr: Inactive

Inspiring

It might also break the workflow for many others.

J

joshanon

Participating Frequently

You had physical control over where your images were in Aperture, too (at least after version 1 🙂 ). My point was that in Bridge, folders are your primary tool. Lightroom continues that, which is weird to me since it adds a database to sort of let you organize in collections with extra work and care. Br/Lr would be more clearly differentiated if Lr leveraged the database first.

FYI, I'm not trying to turn this into an Aperture vs. Lightroom debate: please don't do so either. My point is just that treating stacks as global elements, at least amongst all collections, would make Lightroom a lot nicer for myself (and from others I know, for many others switching to Lightroom).

john beardsworth

Community Expert

I think you are misunderstanding Lightroom. It offers both physical control of photos, and virtual organization, unlike Aperture which only offered virtual organization and hid physical management in the Reorganise Masters/Oriignals dialog.

Folders is a first class citizen in Lightroom, and that's right because we should have physical control of our photos. On the other hand, making Folders so prominent in the UI does cause some people to think it is the primary organizational tool, or as you put it Lightroom "wants you to still use folders to manage everything and to play with files directly". While it's an obvious inference, it's not really true and Lightroom is really just giving you physical management through Folders and virtual management (categorization and grouping) through Collections.

If you want to "abstract" your folders, just right click the Folders panel and hide it.

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