P: LR 4.3: Stacked photos don't work correctly in collections in catalogs imported from PSE8.0.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

They work as expected in Folders, but no icon shows up in collections. In collections, if I choose Expand All Stacks the stacked photos do expand, but no other stack commands can be executed on them. Photos which were not stacked in Elements can be stacked, unstacked etc. Only the ones that were in stacks in elements have this problem, which unfortunately is every photo I ever edited in PSE8.0.

[John R Ellis]

I see these symptoms too. The catalog conversion is clearly buggy here.

But note that, in general, stacking is specific to the folder or collection. That is, if you stack two photos when viewing a folder, they won't appear as stacked when viewing a collection that contains them (and vice versa). This is much different than PSE.

So even if the PSE-to-LR conversion worked properly, it wouldn't give you the behavior that you probably desire (stacking being global, rather than specific to folders and collections). To my knowledge, no one has provided realistic use-cases for LR's behavior. (There is a topic here somewhere on that issue, which you could add your opinion and vote for.)

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

That is unfortunate, since I have 10 years worth of photos in PSE. They're all organized into PSE albums, which become Collections in LR, and every photo that's every been edited is then in a stack (PSE version set), since that's the default.

I don't actually care if the stacks are global, because I don't use folders to navigate my photos, I use albums or collections, so I really need the stacks to work in the Collections. Unfortunately, I can't even fix it manually, since the photos are sort of half-stacked in the collection view (they will respond to expand all and collapse all) but can't be unstacked. I could import the photos into a new LR4, rather than doing the upgrade, but then I'd have to recreate collections, redo the tagging, and recreate stacks. Not likely.

I was hoping for a workaround - get a trial version of PSE11 and upgrade all your catalogs and then import into LR.

I'm considering an upgrade to full PS, but if I need PSE anyway, perhaps not.

[John R Ellis]

When I converted from PSE 8 to LR 3, I ended up writing a script using the LR SDK, because the catalog conversion didn't meet my needs. Unfortunately, the SDK doesn't provide the ability to stack photos in a collection, so for you it's not even possible to write a custom script.

[Brett N]

That certainly is some strange behavior. I've logged a bug with our engineers to see about getting this fixed.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

That is great news. Thank you. If I can provide any additional information, assistance in reproducing, let me know.

[J453]

Fixed for Elements 11 or later with Lightroom 5 or later.