Harness the Organizational Power of Auto-Stacking in Lightroom

If you work in certain genres of photography or shoot with a certain style, you might often come home with thousands of images and a small organizational nightmare awaiting you in Lightroom. This helpful tutorial will show you show to quickly and automatically wrangle those huge sets of images into something much more organized and manageable.

When I'm shooting with my Phantom 4 Pro, I almost always use automatic exposure bracketing, giving me five copies of every shot. While this gives me the necessary dynamic range I need later, it makes it an absolute pain to cull the shots. That's when the beauty of auto-stacking comes into play. The concept is simple: if Lightroom detects that you took multiple photos within a certain timeframe that you specify, it recognizes that those are probably all the same event — bracketed exposures, a diving catch, a dip of the bride — and it groups them into much more manageable stacks. This great video from Anthony Morganti will show you exactly how to harness the power of the auto-stacking feature in Lightroom. It's a simple trick, but the time you save is huge, as it allows you to both quickly narrow in on single events within a large set and browse the collection with ease.