P: SDK: stack ops

[areohbee]

1st choice would be a complete set of stack ops, but my present need is just to be able to expand a stack so a photo can be selected that's under another. Another solution to my immediate need (and some others) would be to have the 'setSelectedPhotos' method always expand stacks as necessary *and* make active whatever source is needed to make the specified photo(s) selected (at least as an option...).

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

What do you mean by "stack ops"? What full list of APIs would you like to see supported on stacks?

[areohbee]

Hi Chris, how's 'bout:

- Create Stack
- Delete Stack (remove all from stack)
- Set Stack Position (for photo already in stack)
- Insert in stack at position (e.g. top, by index, bottom, ...)
- Remove from stack
- Expand stack (and optionally select all).
- Collapse stack
- Put stack in a new blank temporary collection, and expand.
- Put stack in the quick collection (or present target collection)...

Get the idea? - perhaps this list could be consolidated and optimized, but the general idea is to be able to do anything and everything to a stack from a plugin.

Bonus Ideas:
- the ability to name stacks and have a photo be in more than one stack.
- be able to define stack types and tie different actions to different stack types.

Thanks,
Rob

[bryn_f]

It'd be great if the API gave access to stacks. I'd like to be able to use panorama, and HDR programs that automatically determine groups of images to be able to group those images in to a stack. Examples: Autopano pro by Kolor lets you find the panoramas automatically. Photomatix batch processing also automagically finds the bracketed sets. Since the built in autostack by capture time doesn't work for all situations, it seems a prime opportunity to let plugins do this autostacking.

[bryn_f]

For my needs (batch stacking bracketed photos and ability for external programs to find panoramas), most important ops would be put specified photos in a stack, and remove specified photos from a stack

[areohbee]

At present, a plugin can only set the stack position when adding a photo to the catalog. I would also like to be able to alter stack-position after the fact, for a variety of reasons, including plugin synchronization of proprietary xmp-like info, i.e. if plugin has saved proprietary xmp-like file, which includes stack position, that info can be applied to the catalog by plugin, including stack-position.

[t3ran]

My +1 for that feature. I'm developing the plugin [0] to find duplicates and stacking them is the most obvious and native way to group photos within the single collection. Ability to manage stacks from SDK would really improve UX in my case.
Thanks.

[0] https://github.com/teran/deduplicator

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I need this feature for my HDR workflow. I stack every HDR series. But the time stack tool isn that perfect. Merge to much or less pictures, so I need to check every stack again.
I simply want 0/-/+1 HDR Stacking. Could simply develop a script for myself, but I can't stack the founded images in a stack because of missing SDK methods.

Rob Cole already make good suggestions of the required features. You have nearly all of them already in the context menu. Just open them to the SDK. Thanks!

[dzigakaiser]

I will also revive this 9 year old topic and add my +1

In addition, or most important to me, would be the possibility to have a photo/photos selected and get their stack and then all photos inside this stack via Lua. 

It is a real bummer that there doesn't seem to be a way to get stack information via script.

If someone knows a way for the functionality above, please feel free to let me know.

I think if Adobe made an effort to open up the scripting possibilities a bit more (maybe even introducing other languages) their product palette would greatly increase in value for professional production. Some of the subscription money could be spent there instead of changing old and working features into buggy tools 😉

Take care,
Dziga

[johnrellis]

The SDK does provides stacking information for folders but not for collections, but it won't let you modify stacking. See the documentation for these keys to photo:getRawMetadata(): countStackInFolderMembers, stackInFoldermembers, isInStackInFolder, stckInFolderIsCollapsed, stackPositionInFolder, topOfStackInFolderContainingPhoto.

[johnrellis]

"I think if Adobe made an effort to open up the scripting possibilities a bit more (maybe even introducing other languages) their product palette would greatly increase in value for professional production. Some of the subscription money could be spent there instead of changing old and working features into buggy tools ;)"

Absolutely agree. But since LR 4, Adobe has put very little effort into the SDK. There are many feature requests on this forum to provide inexplicably missing SDK features that would significantly enhance the capabilities of plugins.

[dzigakaiser]

Thank you! That might come in very handy.

For now, lacking this information, I worked around it by creating a collection for the panorama images first and then retrieving the collection and then all member photos from my selection.

I actually didn't know LR writes stacking information into the metadata but that explains why simple grouping/stacking takes so long on houndreds of files and torments the drive they are on. ^¬^

[johnrellis]

"I actually didn't know LR writes stacking information into the metadata but that explains why simple grouping/stacking takes so long on houndreds of files and torments the drive they are on."

The stacking gets written to the catalog file but not to the metadata stored inside photo files or their sidecars.  So something else is tormenting your disks.

[dzigakaiser]

Ah, I misunderstood then. I also see right now that it's actually not tormenting the drive when stacking but LR takes a very long time writing the info to the database. I am gonna open a new thread for this, though, to find out if this can be optimized somehow:) Thanks for your help so far!

[thomas5CED]

Is there any update on this? The auto stacking features in lightroom are quite limited and scripting support would really help here (Which company wouldn't like the community implementing missing features for them?). I don't care that much about modifying UI related stack operations (expand/collapse), but I am more intersted in insert/remove/create functionality. This can probably be done with 2 functions like stackAfterPhoto(a, b) (adds a photo b to the stack of a after a, or creates a new stack consisting of a and b) and a function removePhotoFromStack.

[SzurszewskiJ]

I would really benefit from having stacking functions added to the SDK, and I suspect others would too. It's not uncommon to have 3-5 versions of a photo, where each DNG or TIFF version was created by a different plugin (first I run the photo through a perspective correction plugin which creates a new file, then I run that through a B&W conversion plugin, which creates another new file, etc.) I would love to be able to automatically stack all of these version of the same photo together, based on the same file name root. But failing that, providing access to stacking functions in the SDK would at least allow me (or someone else) to write a Lua plugin to do something like this. Or maybe if stacking was available in the SDK, developers of the plugins I mentioned above would add an option to stack their new file with the source file, much like there is a stacking option in the Enhance dialog when using AI Denoise.