A Lesser Known Lightroom Feature That'll Help Keep Your Photos Organized

If you come home with a lot of images from one shoot, trying to organize them all can be quite the undertaking. Luckily, Lightroom has some helpful automatic features to assist you with this, and this one is probably my personal favorite.

Coming to you from Scott Kelby, this great video talks about the auto-stack feature in Lightroom and how the latest version can help you organize your photos. In many situations, you'll take multiple shots with the intention of either combining them or only using one, and it can be a bit annoying to deal with 20 variations of the same image in Lightroom when you're trying to cull the shoot. For example, I might come home with 15 shots of a single baseball play or sets of 5 from exposure bracketing, and when it comes to organization, I want to treat those like a single shot. This is where auto-stacking comes in. This features uses the capture times of images and groups them based on the temporal proximity you select. So, for example, if I select a one-second interval, any shots taken within one second of each other will end up in the same group, making it easy to groups all those brackets or plays at the plate together. It's a highly useful feature; check out the video above for the complete rundown. 

Alex Cooke's picture

Alex Cooke is a Cleveland-based portrait, events, and landscape photographer. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Music Composition. He is also an avid equestrian.

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4 Comments

Awesome feature! I happened to be using Lightroom when this article popped up and had photos that qualified for stacks. Worked perfectly!!

Thanks Scott. A little known feature that looks really helpful (and now, made even better!). And your presentation style is great, too. Always enjoy watching and listening to you work.

Pretty cool.

Super nice feature, but there is a downside I can't seem to get around. When my shots are stacked and I sort the galllery by attribute/rating to see every image rated with a certain number of stars, Lightroom can't show me the shots that is rated but hidden inside a stack. I can of course make my way up in the menu to expand all stacks, but it would be nice if Lightroom automatically switched from stacked view to show all rated shots in situations like this. Or should I approach this differently?