Albums and Stacks - Terrible Design

Having spent hundreds (maybe thousands) of hours editing and organising our collection of more than 20,000 photos with PSE 7, we have created many stacks and version sets (a great feature). Now, trying to create some albums for easy viewing , we find that one cannot include a photo in an album without getting every photo in the stack or version set.
Not believing that this could be an intended feature, we started to look for bug fixes or other information.  Amongst other things, I found in this forum the following amazing information:
"Yes, it's an unfortunate design feature of PSE 6 and 7 that if you put one photo from a version set or stack in an album, all of the photos of the set or stack get included as well.  Many people have complained about that.   Adobe's intended usage of stacks is that all of the photos in a stack are of the same scene or content, and that there is just one "best" photo (the top photo); under that design, it makes sense to include the entire stack in an album"
It makes sense to include the entire stack in an album??
Pardon me. Exactly the opposite. An album is the place where you want to look at your photos and show them to interested friends. Why on earth do you want to include all versions of an edited photo, or all photos of the same scene?
Excuse me if I'am cross, but this must be the worst design feature of any program that I have ever seen.  To make it worse, when you remove the unwanted photos  from you album (even a slower process than stacking them!), all the photos belonging to the stack are removed. The only way out seems to be to remove the required photos from their stacks or version sets, thus defeating the primary purpose of stacks and version sets.  No wonder the PSE organiser gets one star only from many reviewers!

Yes, you are right. I should have quoted more:
On May 1 2009, you wrote in this forum:
"Yes, it's an unfortunate design feature of PSE 6 and 7 that if you put one photo from a version set or stack in an album, all of the photos of the set or stack get included as well.  Many people have complained about that.   Adobe's intended usage of stacks is that all of the photos in a stack are of the same scene or content, and that there is just one "best" photo (the top photo); under that design, it makes sense to include the entire stack in an album.  But many people use stacks differently (more like tags), and there isn't one best photo in a stack, and they run into problems like that with albums"
I objected against the ridiculous conclusion "under that design, it makes sense to include the entire stack in an album."
On Nov 30 2009, you replied to by post:
Adobe's intended design: A stack has one best photo in it (the top). When you include a stack in an album, the entire stack is included, but only the best photo from each stack will be shown in the Organizer (unless you expand the stacks).  When you "share" that album using various mechanisms (Photoshop.com, Online Album, Flickr, etc.), again only the best photo from each stack would be included -- your friends won't see the other photos.
That design is reasonable and consistent, though it's not the way some people want to use stacks.  They would prefer that there could be many "best" photos in a stack, but when they use PSE stacks that way, they find that it doesn't interact very well with the rest of the Organizer.
Unfortunately, in PSE 7 Adobe introduced some bugs in the implementation of their design.  In particular, some of the sharing mechanisms include all the photos in a stack.
Do you see it now? The first quote says  that it " under that design it makes sense to include all photos in a stack in an album".  The second quote says adobe introduced bugs in the implementation of their design.
If the second quote is correct, there is some slight hope!  If the first is correct - no hope - The designers have no idea. I would suggest that  options to include the topmost, any photo in a stack or all in a stack are feasable, with the topmost one being the default.

Similar Messages

  • Confused on albums and stacks

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    Well, admitting my confusion, here are more details:
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    Recently I got tired of scrolling through hundreds and hundreds of pictures in a project, so if I ran into 30 pictures from a dog show, or party, or vacation, I just selected them and turned them into a stack. I created 20-30 stacks for 2009, another 15-20 for 2008, reducing the browser scrolling time dramatically.
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    To my 'confusion' each time I included a picture in a stack (within a single project) the whole stack was added to the static album in my 'Collections' folder [remember Collections is not inside the same project.]
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    I had upgraded to Aperture 2.1.4 and Snow Leopard and synced to iPhone without problem, before I started stacking things.
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