Auto Stacking not working as expected

[CameraCarl]

Lightroom Version Number

11.2

Operating System

1. macOS 11 Big Sur

I have about 5000 images in a folder. I want to auto stack a selection of about 110 of these images so I can do a batch HDR converstion. I go into Grid view of the Library module and select those 110 images. Then I go into Photo > Stacking > Auto-Stack by Capture Time. When the window opens, I tell it to stack with a 2 second tolerance. I would expect to get about 30-40 stacks of 3 images per stack. But Lightroom stacks the entire folder instead, resulting in almost 1000 stacks. I don't want the entire folder auto-stacked since many of the images are bursts of wildlife images, not HDRs of landscape images. What am I doing wrong? I thought I was following the instructions in the articles I read on the internet.

 

[johnrellis]

It looks like Auto-Stack By Capture Time ignores the current selection and instead operates on all the photos currently displayed in Grid view for the current folder. Which is weird, but not unusual for the more obscure corners of LR Library, which hasn't gotten much love in many years.

You can work around this by using a filter that displays just the images you want to stack. For example, select the 110 images, do Photo > Color Label > Red, then filter by the Red label, so only the 110 images are displayed. Then invoke Auto-Stack By Capture Time.

Alternatively, move the 110 images to a temporary folder, stack them, move them back.

 

[CameraCarl]

It looks like Auto-Stack By Capture Time ignores the current selection and instead operates on all the photos currently displayed in Grid view for the current folder. Which is weird, but not unusual for the more obscure corners of LR Library, which hasn't gotten much love in many years.

You can work around this by using a filter that displays just the images you want to stack. For example, select the 110 images, do Photo > Color Label > Red, then filter by the Red label, so only the 110 images are displayed. Then invoke Auto-Stack By Capture Time.

Alternatively, move the 110 images to a temporary folder, stack them, move them back.

Thank you. The suggestion to assign color labels then filtering then auto-stacking seems to work.

 

[bobsomrak]

I agree it is not working as ”Expected” although it is as designed. If it had been designed logically it should just stack the selected images.