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P: Stacks display correctly in Album view but appear unstacked in Folder view for legacy folders created before 9.3

Forum|Forum|3 months ago
April 17, 2026
3 replies
130 views

How do I get my stacks back?

windows

Correct answer Anshul_Saini

@Ven Seshadri, thank you again for all the testing and information you provided.

I reviewed the findings with the product team and the engineering team. After investigating the screenshots, logs, and behavior you’ve documented, the team determined that the stack data itself is intact and Lightroom is currently behaving as designed.

The current behavior is:

• When viewing an Album, stacks are displayed normally.
• When viewing a Folder:

If the folder contains only a single album, stacks will be displayed.
If the folder contains multiple albums, Lightroom expands the contents and does not display stacks at the folder level.

This explains why your stacks appear correctly in Albums but are expanded when viewing certain Folder-level views.

The team also confirmed that this behavior is not new to 9.3 and has existed for several years.

For now, the recommended workflow is to view the individual Albums when working with stacks.

Thank you again for all your help investigating this.

Best,
Anshul Saini

Anshul_Saini

Community Manager

@Ven Seshadri, thanks for the detailed follow-up, a screenshot, and the additional testing on Lightroom Web.

Would you mind trying switching to Grid view, clicking on a different image, and then navigating back to your stacked images? See if this re-enables the stack grouping/ungroup functionality.

To help us investigate your specific case further, could you clarify:

Were your stacks created manually or via auto-stacking (e.g., by capture time)?
Did the stacks become ungrouped immediately after the upgrade, or after performing a specific action (like sorting, culling, or editing in another app)?
Are all stacks affected, or only certain folders/albums?

One more thing that would help engineering is if you could confirm whether:

Newly created stacks after 9.3.1 work correctly?
Or are even newly created stacks immediately becoming ungrouped as well, or are they grayed out and you are not even able to create them anymore?
Does this affect only panorama stacks or manually created stacks, too?

Right now, I don't have a recovery/reset procedure to restore the historical stack relationships, and I don't want to suggest anything that might mess things up for you. Once you share all the info, we will go ahead and escalate it to the product team for investigation.

Thanks again for your patience and cooperation.

Best,
Anshul Saini

Ven SeshadriAuthor

Participating Frequently

Hi Anshul,

I did some more investigating, and have narrowed the problem down. It appears that the stacks are in fact there, but are only showing as stacks when I view the “album” and not when I view the “folder containing the album”.

See below two screen shots, first using “album” view and the second using the “folder” view. See bottom left to see what I have clicked on to view and note the panorama stack that appears on the top row, rightmost image in the first screen capture, which is ungrouped in the second screen capture:

And now the “folder” view:

So the stacks are there, but for some reason are not being recognized in the second view.

I tried this with a new folder, album, and creating a stack with three random images, but the problem did not reappear. So I’m guessing that it has something to do with the old folders / albums themselves.

Let me know if an in-person, onlline debugging session would be helpful.

Regards,
Ven.

Anshul_Saini

Community Manager

@Ven Seshadri, thank you for digging into this further. This is actually a very important finding.

Based on your testing and screenshots, it appears the stack information itself has not been lost.

That significantly changes the investigation from “stacks disappeared” to something that looks more like a stack rendering/display inconsistency between the Album view and the Folder view for existing content.

A couple more questions that would help before I take this back to the team:

• Are all affected albums older albums created before updating to 9.3.x?
• Do all historical stacks exhibit this behavior, or only panorama stacks?
• If you create a brand-new stack inside one of the affected older folders/albums, does the new stack also fail to appear in Folder view?

Also, please share the DxDiag log as well:

Press the Windows key on your keyboard or click the Windows button in the taskbar.
Type 'dxdiag' (this does a search for the program).
Press the Enter key.
Wait for the DxDiag window to appear.
When it's enabled, click the Save All Information button.
Save the DxDiag.txt file and submit it when reporting problems.

I’ll share these findings, the DxDiag log, and your screenshots with the product team.

Thank you again for taking the time to isolate the behavior thoroughly.

Best,
Anshul Saini

Ven SeshadriAuthor

Participating Frequently

Hi Anshul,

Thanks for the followup.

I upgraded to Version 9.3.1. The problem persists.

I am on Windows 11 using Lightroom CC (not Classic). The stacks menu is under “Edit” (Edit->Stacks). All of the options under Stacks are greyed out. Same when I right click on the photo (Group and Ungroup are greyed out).

Here is the info you are asking for:

System Info:
Lightroom version: 9.3.1 x64 [ 20260429-1653-6cd29ca ] (Apr 29 2026)
NGL Version: 1.43.0.5
WF Version: 8.3 5c9a130
VF Version: 1.0.164.1
HIL Version: 40501
CAI Version: c2pa-c/0.6.0 c2pa-rs/0.46.0
PH Version: 5.2.3
Adobe GSDK Version: 1.4.0.210
CR Version: 29.0.0.202506270808_710830c
Catalog ID: bf81104fff684fd3b4fe03ad0d835e74

Operating system: Windows 11
OS Version: Windows 11 Home (2009)
Application architecture: x64
System architecture: x64
Computer model: Acer Aspire TC-1760 / 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-12400
Logical processor count: 12
Processor speed: 2.4 GHz
Real memory available to Lightroom: 12064.2 MB
Real memory used by Lightroom: 1422.9 MB (11.7%)
Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 1446.0 MB
Memory cache size: 2027.8 MB

Internal Camera Raw version: 18.3 [ 2526 ]
Maximum thread count used by Camera Raw: 7
Camera Raw SIMD optimization: SSE2,AVX,AVX2
Camera Raw virtual memory: 0MB / 3984MB (0%)

Displays: 1) 1920x1080, 2) 1920x1080
System DPI setting: 96 DPI
Dark Mode: No
Desktop composition enabled: Yes
Input types: Multitouch: No, Integrated touch: No, Integrated pen: No, External touch: No, External pen: No, Keyboard: No

Graphics Processor Info: DirectX: Intel(R) UHD Graphics 730 (30.0.101.1002)
Graphics Processor Detail: loaded: Yes, supported: Yes, compute: Yes, init: I3_GPU4, hard: success, soft: success, al: No, dl: No
OS Media Capability: true

Application Folder: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Lightroom CC
Settings Folder: C:\Users\sesha\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom CC
Library Folder: C:\Users\sesha\AppData\Local\Adobe\Lightroom CC\Data
Screenshot of one album (created in Nov 2024) with an “ungrouped” panorama stack (the 7 portrait-orientation shots form the “Pano” image immediately following them):
Before the upgrade, the seven shots would have all been grouped into a stack under the “Pano” image.

Thanks for the followup. I’m looking forward to your feedback and how to get this corrected. It really has messed up what I’m doing.

Regards,
Ven.

Anshul_Saini

Community Manager

Hi @Ven Seshadri,

Thanks for reporting this. Please update to Lightroom v9.3.1 first, then check whether the stacking issue still persists.

Also, could you help confirm something important:

• Are the stacks actually gone?

If you go to Photo > Stacking, do you still see stack-related options/indicators?
Or is the “Ungroup” option greyed out?

• It’s also possible the sort order changed after the update, which can make stacks appear visually expanded/un-grouped even though the stack data still exists.

If the issue continues after updating, please share:

• Your full System Info

* Go to Help > System Info

* Copy & paste it into your reply

• A short screen recording demonstrating the issue

* Especially showing the stacks before/after upgrade or how they appear ungrouped

We're looking forward to hearing back from you.

Best,

Anshul Saini

Ven SeshadriAuthor

Participating Frequently

Here is the System Info for my laptop on which this happens also (I use both this and the other computer for which I provided the System Info):

Lightroom version: 9.3.1 x64 [ 20260429-1653-6cd29ca ] (Apr 29 2026)
NGL Version: 1.43.0.5
WF Version: 8.3 5c9a130
VF Version: 1.0.164.1
HIL Version: 40501
CAI Version: c2pa-c/0.6.0 c2pa-rs/0.46.0
PH Version: 5.2.3
Adobe GSDK Version: 1.4.0.210
CR Version: 29.0.0.202506270808_710830c
Catalog ID: bf81104fff684fd3b4fe03ad0d835e74

Operating system: Windows 11
OS Version: Windows 11 Home (2009)
Application architecture: x64
System architecture: x64
Computer model: ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. ROG Zephyrus G14 GA403UH_GA403UH / AMD Ryzen 9 270 w/ Radeon 780M Graphics
Logical processor count: 16
Processor speed: 3.9 GHz
Real memory available to Lightroom: 15661.2 MB
Real memory used by Lightroom: 1034.2 MB (6.6%)
Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 1276.7 MB
Memory cache size: 1010.8 MB

Internal Camera Raw version: 18.3 [ 2526 ]
Maximum thread count used by Camera Raw: 9
Camera Raw SIMD optimization: SSE2,AVX,AVX2
Camera Raw virtual memory: 0MB / 5782MB (0%)

Display: 2880x1800
System DPI setting: 168 DPI (high DPI mode)
Dark Mode: No
Desktop composition enabled: Yes
Input types: Multitouch: No, Integrated touch: No, Integrated pen: No, External touch: No, External pen: No, Keyboard: No

Graphics Processor Info: DirectX: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5050 Laptop GPU (32.0.15.9184) - 7.5 GB
Graphics Processor Detail: loaded: Yes, supported: Yes, compute: Yes, init: I4_GPU4, hard: success, soft: success, al: Yes, dl: No
OS Media Capability: true

Application Folder: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Lightroom CC
Settings Folder: C:\Users\sesha\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom CC
Library Folder: C:\Users\sesha\AppData\Local\Adobe\Lightroom CC\Data

Sameer K

Community Manager

Thanks for the update. As a quick test, please log in to Lightroom Web (https://lightroom.adobe.com) & check if the images in albums appear unstacked.

Thanks!
Sameer K

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