Auto-Stack stacks erractically

I have problems with auto-stack -- the stacks are more-or-less random. Unrelated photos are grouped, yet ones take only a few seconds apart are not stacked. This seems consistent every time I've tried it. Adjusting the time slider just ends up with a very slow response. The latest project I'm trying it with has 1600 pictures from 3 different cameras, but even continuous sequences from the same one are messed up. I've tried it on reduced selections -- same problems.
I've given up with it and do it all manually now.
Anybody got it working properly?
G5 dual 1.8 GHz Mac OS X (10.4.4) Olympus E-1, E-300 (+ Canon Digital Ixus V2)

I noticed with my Canon XT that there is a bug in Aperture stacking when you first connect the camera up. Perhaps this is causing your problems as well. In my case when the camera is hooked up, and aperture automatically goes to the import mode, all photos on the camera have the same date and time, so the stacking doesn't work properly. What I do to work around it is cancel the import mode, and then turn the import mode on again (click on that arrow in top left corner). This causes all the images to have the correct time in the import window, and stacking works correctly.

Similar Messages

Improve Auto-Stack and Process Collections with user settings

I have read through all of the Bridge request discussions, and encountered a few comments on the stacking process but nothing to explain my critique and feature request. My apologies for any redundancy.
Bridge CS4 includes two features that would (virtually) streamline my entire photo-organization workflow. Brilliant! Except that they offer zero configuration and my default scenario is very different from Adobe's, so these two would-be-wonderful features are pretty much useless to me, and to anybody else who doesn't happen to shoot in the way the presets are configured.
The first feature is to automatically group images into stacks, based on their similarity, exposure settings, and timestamps. Unfortunately Bridge considers no minimum or maximum amount of photos per stack, and has a fixed timestamp window of 18 seconds. I shoot everything in three-exposure bursts and sometimes multiple shots in less than 18 seconds, so being able to say "process collections in 3-item stacks only" would be absolutely perfect. For other people, being able to limit the timestamp range or other min/max exposure options would work great.
The second feature, which could save me hours every week but is equally useless, is to automatically process collections in Photoshop. My biggest ire about this function is that it completely ignores stacks that I have manually created AND stacks that were previously created using the auto-stack feature. Every time this function is run, it re-runs the auto-stack process from scratch and then delivers the collections to Photoshop. Not only is this made useless by the previously mentioned inflexibility of the auto-stack process, but even if auto-stack worked perfectly, this would waste time by doing the entire thing again and denying the user the option to review the stacks before committing to the Photoshop processing. The process collections feature would also be much improved if the option were given to process ONLY panoramas or HDR photos, or auto-detect. I have never shot a panorama in my life and I'm sure plenty of people have never shot HDR, but Photoshop isn't capable of knowing our intentions and there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to instruct it.

Agree. It is an interesting capability that falls short of being really useful. I feel like an ingrate to complain, but ...
I'd also like to see the capability to specify something than "Auto" for the panorama option. My experience is that most of my panos work best with "Cylindrical + Geometric Correction".
My experience is that once you get past 5+ images in a pano, it becomes very tedious ... and then 20+ images in rows is painful. Unlike a single image that you can quickly evaluate, with panos I find I need to make the pano to tell if it going to turn out. I have been generating smaller 1800x1200 or 1200x1800 files to speed up the evaluation process, but it is still very manual and tedious.
The Auto-Stack generates a AutoCollectionCache.xml, but I haven't found it workable to edit this. I'd like to be able to modify it to "force" my knowledge of what is in a group. It seems to check the time-stamp, and re-do the Auto-Stack, thus ignoring my changes. Sigh.

CS4 Bridge Auto stack tool makes my computer Crash

I'm using a modern computer running Windows XP, 3 GB of memory , a modern video card with 1 GB of memory and the latest drivers, Photoshop CS 4 (with the latest updates), and the bridge auto-stack panorama/HDR doesn't work. When I click on the tool I get an error message that says "images missing preview data (then the image name) within okay box. This repeats on and on, until a file is created named "auto collection cash.XML). It would appear that the process is complete however this is not the case as bridge locked up and I can't access the stack. Closing and reopening bridge allows me to delete the XML file. I can then unstacked the images. Incidentally, if I manually select the files, I can successfully use either the panorama, or HDR tool, so it would appear that it's not a problem with the files themselves. If I use the auto stack tool on JPEG files it works. If I use it on any folder with raw files (in this case canon CR2), the 'images missing preview data" dialog box opens up.
Recently, I worked with several Adobe support technicians, who came to the conclusion that I had a problem with my Windows user file, and not with Photoshop and bridge. I accepted this principle and created a new user account in Windows, I used the Adobe downloadable uninstall program (to clean out Photoshop and any registry entries). I then reinstalled Photoshop and re-created my preferences etc. and found that the auto stack tool worked fine. It's been about two weeks, and as you may imagine there is an ongoing development and improving of the Windows user file. Yesterday I found the auto stack lockup problem has returned.
Can anyone suggest why I'm having this problem? I'm aware that I can repeat the above, but I'm concerned that it will not solve the problem long term. This auto stack tool could be very helpful, but I'm not sure it's worth all the time and effort to fix it only short-term.
Michael

Hello: I notice that no one has replied to your post. That is a shame. I am having the exact same problem that you described and it is happening in two different macs running the latest version of Leopard, OS 10. 5.8. I believe the problem is with Adobe and not your operating system, or any corrupted files in your user files. Have you had any luck solving your problem? If so, please share it with me, as I think our problems are related. Thank you, GuruDog

Auto-stack by name

One feature that I feel is currently missing from Lightroom is the ability to *automatically* stack multiple versions of the same images when they are(/were) made outside of Lightroom. Usually, these versions are related to each other by their name. It would be convenient if there were an auto-stack function that would use the file names to determine which files to stack.
Such a function could split the file names into a base name and a suffix, and stack all images with the same base name. Preferably, there should be a couple of ways to determine the base name:
1) Use a user-definable suffix delimiter (for example '-').
2) Use a fixed base name length (n characters).
3) Use a pattern (such as 'P##??-', where # is any digit and ? is any character)
I think this simple function would greatly improve the ease of use of stacks, especially when using Lightroom alongside other applications.
Simon

Yes, that sounds like a good idea. This could be easily implemented by dragging the 'stack by time' slider all the way to the left. Currently, this simply splits all stacks, like the 'unstack' command.
The only (minor) disadvantage of this method would be images that have no, or inconsistent, time information, such as composites or JPGs with stripped headers. Despite this, stacking by identical date/time would certainly be a good start.

Auto Stack Freezes Program

I have a Dual 2.5Ghz G5 with 7GB ram and a Nvidia 6800 Ultra video card - well over the recommended specs in everyway. I am having issues with Autostack being slow (hours) and/or hanging the program. I have tried importing 6900 medium sized jpegs (shot with a Nikon D2h) from a folder containing a older projects I am doing, which seems like it should be with within the capablities of the program with the hardware I am using. I will then select auto stack, and can move the slider slightly to adjust the time interval before the program gives me the spinning beachball, which it will then spend hours trying to process or will then freeze the program indefinitely (I let it go for 11 hours once) at which time I have to force quit it.
I then tried it with a ancient project with jpegs from a Nikon Coolpix 950 which produced a averagew file size of less than a 1 Mb. I Auto-stacked 650 photos but still had the beach ball and it took about 10 minutes to complete- much longer than I expected with such small files.
I have not tried RAW files yet.
I hope somene has a answer on how I can possibly alleviate the problem, the auto stack is one of my favorite features so far when I can get it to work.
Even with this problem I can say this program is awesome. It's very power hungry, but truly unlike anything I have used and a excellent 1.0 effort.
Dual 2.5ghz G5 Mac OS X (10.4.3)

Maybe this is why in the training DVD supplied with Aperture Apple recommends using the auto stack feature at the time of import from memory card or camera. There's a slider at the bottom of the import page which, if memory serves me correctly, does the auto stack command. This way you'll be stacking only say 100 raw images from a 1gb card and the numbers won't get too taxing.
Still, this should be a fairly simple fix for Apple to sort out so here's hoping they get on the case sharpish! I think the auto stack HUD is loading each individual image instead of just working with the attached data.
Power Mac G5 dual 2ghz Mac OS X (10.4.3) 2.5GB RAM, 9800 Pro graphics

PSE wish list - Auto stacking RAW + JPGs

I'm using PSE V10 and have a 'wish list' item for suggested improvements to the program.
A feature that would be extremely valuable to many users would be the ability to auto stack photos where there are the RAW + JPG images present in the Catalog. The JPG would end up on top of the stack.
This can be done manually but is tedious when there are many photos to deal with. Failing an automatic feature a single action shortcut to access the 'Stack | Stack selected photos' command would be useful.
a forum discussion on this topic is here: http://forums.adobe.com/message/4585792#4585792

As reported above I THOUGHT I'd found a shortcut suitable for stacking a JPG over a RAW.
However, the stack command in the main menu, which has the shortcut Ctrl+Alt+S will stack the RAW over the JPG whenever the RAW thumbnail is ahead of the JPG in the Catalog. I want the reverse to happen.
I found I can get the JPG to stack over a RAW, if the RAW appears before the JPG, by selecting the RAW first then with the Ctrl button down select the JPG. Then using 'Stack | Stack selected photos' in the mouse right click menu. However, this fails when using Ctrl+Alt+S whenever the RAW is listed before the JPG. Am I missing something?

CS6 Bridge "Auto-Stack" question

As a landscape photographer I shoot multiple exposures of the same image for use in HDR. I recently used the Auto-Stack feature under Stacks in Bridge. It did not work well, it grouped the images incorrectly. Now I want to undo this and go back to the basic panel where all the images are shown in sequence. How do I do this? I have tried to purge this file, restarted Bridge but always shows it with stacks. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

Don't have Bridge active for the moment but in the same menu as you found autostacks there is an option to unstack all from groups. You probably have to select all files first. After unstack all you can use the sort filter date created to getbthem again in the right order.
Regards
Sent from my iPad

Importing from camera, auto-stack doesn't work

Hi all,
I've been using aperture for a while now. According to the manual Aperture should be able to do an auto-stack to the imported pictures and I can see the interval seconds slider on the import page. My camera is Canon 5d and I'm importing raw pictures.
My problem is that if I touch the slider, it creates one huge stack of all the images on the camera memory card. So if it does an autostack, it treats all images as if they'd been shot at the exact same second. This is illustrated also if I tell aperture to sort the not yet imported pictures according to shooting time. They just appear in a random order after that.
When the pictures have been imported, there is a correct shooting time/date in the EXIF information of the pictures. I'm not even sure if this is an aperture problem or a camera setting problem. When I look at the pictures on the camera screen, I can see the correct shooting time even in there.
Any ideas?
/hv

Not sure if this would make a difference, but are you importing the photos directly from the camera or are you using a card reader with your memory card?

Intelligent Auto-Stack by burst Time?

Hi,
I'm just back from a dawn shoot by the sea where I was using auto-bracketing. Have hundreds of shots as each moment gives different reflections, blurry movements of boats, and people (late partygoers, early fishermen ;-) etc, I had lots of ND etc in use to get really silky water ... the result?
Lots of small groups of shots (3 at a time) that are spread over a lot of time, and the existing auto-stack is reasonably useless. But, they were taken with high-speed drive on, and so I know there is only fractions of a second BETWEEN the shots - please can you give us an option to auto-stack by the time *between* the shots? You have the start time of a shot, and the length of a shot (shutter speed), so you could compute the gap between them just as easily as just looking at the start time.
This would allow me to stack by (say) 1/4 second which would catch all of my groups of shots perfectly, even though some shots in a group are 15s long
And, at a sporting event, I could auto-stack my shots by each burst of the shutter, no longer how long, and still get seperate stacks for bursts taken even half a second apart!
Ppppppplllllleeeeeaaaaassssseeeeeee ................

However I find the capture time of photos in any one stack exceed 1 minute!! For instance, these are the capture times of photos in a single stack:
8:19:12PM, 8:19:25PM, 8:19:43PM, 8:20:24PM, 8:21:19PM, 8:21:45PM
This is a maximum interval setting. It has nothing to do with the total timespan of the whole sequence. Just, how closely-spaced the individual shots were. These were less than half a minute apart.
IOW: how long can pass between one shot and the following one, before that is no longer considered to be part of the same continuing sequence.
RP

Auto Stack JPG's in Front of Raw

Hi,
I shoot everything JPG plus Raw. I have a number of reasons why, but would rather not make this post any longer..... I would like to be able to view everything in my library with all JPG's stacked in front of the RAW with the same file name. I have been able to Auto-Stack by time (setting time to Zero Seconds) does this. The Problem is that the NEF's appear first in the stack. I want the JPG's first, always. I can figure out any way to do this automatically. It looks like I would have to manually change which file is first. I shoot thousands and thousands of files, I need to automate this. How can I do this?
Secondarily, does anyone know how I could apply a star rating to just the jpg and have it also apply to the raw file?
Thanks

impactsystemsDT wrote:
Thanks for the question. Here is an example of why
Yesterday - Easter Egg Hunt at my House. I shot about 300 pictures. Raw plus Jpg. I want to go through them and I'll choose about 25-35 shots to document the event and perhaps make a photo book that I can keep for us and send to a few friends. I want the JPG's for this purpose. My JPG's generally look quite good. I do pretty good job with my in camera capture and settings. So, I want to be able to either spend zero time on these 25-35 shots or perhaps just 30 seconds to 1 minute on some or all to crop, vignette or some very quick adjustments, make my book and I'm done. My wife is happy, my friends are happy and I have somehting to remeber the event.
Then I will then have 2-5 really nice shots that I'll want to really work on. I might spend 10-20 minutes on each of these. I will generally process the raw file for the purpose. Occassionally the JPG's are just fine, so I'll just process those a bit further. I'll end of with a 2-5 "Hero" shots of the event. I might use these to add to the photo book or to print or add to my portfolio. Often I might just tag them to work tomorrow or next week or even next month when I have more time.
So I want to go select my 25-35 shots from the 300 with a simple pick off the JPG's, then the one's I really want the very best quality and versatility I.d like to be able to click on the stack (JPG in Front, Raw behind total of just 2 shots) and work the Raw file (the Negative). I don't ever have time to process more than a handful of Raw shots from any one shoot and frankly 95% of the time the JPG's look as good as the Raw files even after a fair amount of processing, so I really only need to process the Raw file on certain types of files. Having said that I am a very competent at processing and use combination of lightroom, photoshop, NIK, OnOne and Topaz. I just don.t need to do post capture and pre-out sharpening, cloning, healing, content aware fill, gradient filters, advanced color processing etc... on 98% of my files. The JPG's I create are good enough most all the time.
It seems that many people would want to work this way. I don't to rate all of the JPG's and the Raw's. I just want the Raw's (negatives) behind the JPG's so I can dive into them if I need to for the 5% or so of the files that I really want to spend time on. That doesn't mean I won't use the the other 95% (well more like 10%), it just meanst that the jpg's are just fine to email to friends or make photo books. Not every file that comes out of Lightroom is supposed to be the cover of Sports Illustrated. Raw and the JPG that I captured are the same file and it should be treated as such. Importing as the same file doesn't give you any access to the JPG so I don't see the purpose.
agree with your workflow and raw+jpg should be linked as same file (as in aperture)

Auto-stack by capture time not correct

Hi,
I have 28 photographs taken sequentialy but not at same intervals; they are part of a collection. I proceed to select all of them and choose "Stacking-Auto stack by capture time..." from the context menu and choose time between stacks as 0:01:00 (one minute)
However I find the capture time of photos in any one stack exceed 1 minute!! For instance, these are the capture times of photos in a single stack:
8:19:12PM, 8:19:25PM, 8:19:43PM, 8:20:24PM, 8:21:19PM, 8:21:45PM
We can clearly see that the capture times between members of this stack are not within 1 minute. What can is happening?
Thanks,
Juan Dent

However I find the capture time of photos in any one stack exceed 1 minute!! For instance, these are the capture times of photos in a single stack:
8:19:12PM, 8:19:25PM, 8:19:43PM, 8:20:24PM, 8:21:19PM, 8:21:45PM
This is a maximum interval setting. It has nothing to do with the total timespan of the whole sequence. Just, how closely-spaced the individual shots were. These were less than half a minute apart.
IOW: how long can pass between one shot and the following one, before that is no longer considered to be part of the same continuing sequence.
RP

Auto Stack with 0 secs doesn't work!

When I put RAW and JPG together in one folder, I would like to stack them via "Auto Stack". Unfortunately the lag of "0 Secs" doesn't work. It should, because the pics have exactly the same shooting time.
When I chose "1 sec" it works, but this stacks my shoot sequences together as well.

Found this post when searching for an answer, but didn't find much elsewhere so I'll post my quick and ugly solution here. I'm sure it can be vastly improved, but I didn't have much more than 5 minutes. Note - setting .visible to false just ended up causing the autohide transition to occur over and over, so instead I'm just temporarily moving the whole sprite offscreen.
(AS3, using CS5 component... note that 'player' is the FLVPlayback instance):
//### force 'autohide' when mouse inactive
var timer:Timer = new Timer(1500, 0);
timer.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER, onTimer);
timer.start();
var skinSprite:DisplayObject;
var prevMouseX:Number;
var prevMouseY:Number;
function onTimer(e:TimerEvent):void {
//get skinSprite if we haven't already
if(!skinSprite) {
    var child:DisplayObject;
    for(var i:Number = 0; i < player.numChildren; i++) {
      child = player.getChildAt(i);
      if(i == 2) { //this is the skinSprite
        skinSprite = child;
//check to see if mouse hasn't moved since last timer event
if(skinSprite && mouseX == prevMouseX && mouseY == prevMouseY) {
    skinSprite.y = -1000;
prevMouseX = mouseX;
prevMouseY = mouseY;
stage.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_MOVE, stage_onMouseMove);
function stage_onMouseMove(e:MouseEvent):void {
if(skinSprite) {
    skinSprite.y = 0;

Auto-stack doesn't work

I am new to Aperture and am exploring all of it's features. Unfortunately I cannot get auto-stack to work. I have a project with 900 pictures. When I slide the auto-stack slider to the right, I get a spinning ball. After a minute it looks like the images have been stacked. When I close the auto-stack HUD, all the stacking disappears again. Am I doing something wrong here? I do not think it has to to wit my MBP. It has to be fast enough.

Not sure if this would make a difference, but are you importing the photos directly from the camera or are you using a card reader with your memory card?

Auto-stack on import in Aperture 3?

My recollection of the Aperture 2 trial was that I could choose to auto-stack, based on times, while importing images. I can't seem to find the option to do that in Aperture 3. Once the images have been imported into a project, I can then have them auto-stacked, but they don't seem to come in that way.
Am I missing something obvious in Aperture 3? Did I hallucinate this feature in Aperture 2?

I've found a way to do it, but it's not as intuitive as it was in Ap2.
The box that shows which images will be imported now as a little check-box by it, and they all start ticked, by default. You have buttons, up top, to check all, or uncheck all. And the button down in the lower right is now labelled "Import Checked," when I think on used to have the option to "Import All" or "Import Selected" (after you'd done normal style multiple selection on the files).
There's an auto-stack dialogue, that you can access at any time from the stacks menu, but you can't actually move the slider unless images are selected. So, on import, do a command-A to select all (as opposed to the check all that's done by default), and then open the auto-stack dialogue and set your time, and you can see how things will stack. Then, press "Import Checked" (assuming they're all still checked), and the images will come in, and already be stacked as they were at the source. So, it's available, but nowhere near as friendly to use as it was.

Auto-stack by capture time messed up my stacks

After manually creating many dozens, perhaps a hundred stacks, I tried the Auto-stack by Capture Time feature. Now my stacks are totally messed up; I either have way too many or none. Is there any way to get back to where I was except by reverting to an earlier saved version of the catalog?

However I find the capture time of photos in any one stack exceed 1 minute!! For instance, these are the capture times of photos in a single stack:
8:19:12PM, 8:19:25PM, 8:19:43PM, 8:20:24PM, 8:21:19PM, 8:21:45PM
This is a maximum interval setting. It has nothing to do with the total timespan of the whole sequence. Just, how closely-spaced the individual shots were. These were less than half a minute apart.
IOW: how long can pass between one shot and the following one, before that is no longer considered to be part of the same continuing sequence.
RP

Auto-Stack stacks erractically

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