From the course: Organizing with Lightroom

Using stacks to organize similar photos or sets - Lightroom Tutorial

From the course: Organizing with Lightroom

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Using stacks to organize similar photos or sets

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- Sometimes as you're capturing photos, you may end up capturing multiple pictures. Maybe it's because you want to stitch together a panoramic photo, or maybe it's because you have multiple images that are part of an HDR set, using the different exposures to create a high dynamic range photo, after the fact. Well, Lightroom makes it easy to cut down on the clutter. Let's go here back to the all photos view. You'll notice in this case, I have some images that are actually groups. So here, let's press I for info and you see we have image 329 and 329 HDR. They're the same photo. One was the HDR captured by the camera and one was the base exposure. Well, let's go back out to the grid view here. I cropped one of these images, but effectively it's two photos of the same image. I can select those here and choose to group those into a stack. The shortcut is Command + G. Now, they appear as just one image. This can be useful if you've got several photos. Maybe it's multiple pictures that are effectively the same. I can select them and group them so they take up less space. Now, when I click, it will show me those images down here, as an expanded view. This allows you to dig into that group there, making it easier to see. And just like an album, you could choose to set that as the stack cover. That's the image that is shown at the top of the stack. So let's do this with some HDR images. In this case, I merged an HDR image in Lightroom and I used these source brackets here of the moon. I shot a series of brackets, both under and overexposed, so I could see the full details of the moon. Let's select those plus the resulting HDR and I'll press Command + G to group them. Remember, feel free to choose which image should be on top of the stack. I'll do this with the merged HDR as the stack cover. Now, when you browse your library, it's significantly less crowded. This makes it easy to see what you're working on and to not get so boiled down with all the different areas. Notice here, this allows me to dig in and see what it is I'm actually editing. But when it sees it in the library, I could see six images in a stack. This allows you to remove duplication and to keep things a little bit less cluttered. So if you shot a lot of photos that are very similar, maybe because you were capturing action, or you were just shooting burst mode for safety, you can group those to cut down on the overall clutter, but still have them all in your library.

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