File management for bracketed exposures?

[AFairley]

Anyone have any tips for file managing bracketed exposures?  If all the brackets are in the same folder/collection, it really clogs things up, but I want to have easy access to the brackets for later stacking or whatever in processing.

Thanks

[JackS]

When first reviewing images that I've bracketed, I  use LR and stack the images using time as the grouping device. You can play with the time difference between shots to get the most brackets stacked.

Then I use color to seperate each stack of bracketed images. I can then easily see what goes where even years later.

Jack

[johnbeardy]

I do almost precisely the same as Jack (just not the "auto" bit), and also stacking as early as I can after importing the pictures. One thing that the colour label does is help me recognise that an oddly composed or exposed image isn't a mistake that can be deleted but belongs to a bracketed sequence or panorama.

[AFairley]

Wow. Just wow.  I am late to the Lightroom dance, but the more I see the more I like.  Thanks John and Jack.

[wolfnowl]

I do pretty much the same as John and Jack.  BTW, one tip from Matt Kloskowski: Let's say your DSLR is set to shoot a set of 5 images for HDR: -2/-1/0/+1/+2 but they're raw files so you really don't need a one-stop difference.  All you want are the -2/0/+2 exposures.  This is hypothetical; for some images you may want more exposures.

Set your grid so that it's five images wide, showing each sequence of five as one row.  Now turn on the Painter tool and set it to paint 'Reject' Flags. Simply put the mouse over the top '-1' exposure and paint down the column, then repeat it with the '+1' column.  Delete those and voila!

Mike.

[johnbeardy]

Remember stacking has downsides too. When you adjust or apply metadata to a "closed" stack, it only applies to the image that's shown - not those hidden inside the stack. While in some circumstances that may be what you want, it can also be a pain in the backside (and is what led me to write my Syncomatic plugin). For example, you may only want a star rating to apply to the top image as you're using stacking to shortlist or show only the best pictures. But if they are merely bracketed, they may all be worth x stars. Or consider keywords, here you'd often want them to apply to all the images, but that does depend on what you are mentally using stacking to achieve. If you want it to indicate the others are rejects, stacking may be preliminary to deleting, so it doesn't matter if you don't keyword them. But you may be using stacking to de-clutter the catalogue's appearance, in which case it's an annoyance that you have to open stacks to apply metadata or adjust the images. It's an inherent awkwardness of stacking.

Also, stacking is a great way for you never to appreciate "slow burners" or forget certain variations existed. If they hadn't been hidden in a stack, might you have looked more closely at them and seen something you hadn't at first appreciated?

A couple of other details are worth noticing
- In LR4 the pick flags are now global, meaning you flag a picture in a collection and it'll be flagged everywhere. But now stacking has gone local and you can create stacks in collections.
- If you use LR4's new trick to drag a folder into the Collections panel, LR creates a new collection with any stacking copied from the folder.

[NikoJorj]

When you adjust or apply metadata to a "closed" stack, it only applies to the image that's shown - not those hidden inside the stack.

For me, the logic behind is that you should stack these exposures with the blended result on top : stacking too early is not that practical indeed. The assembly (mostly for panos in my case) is one of the things I do with the first "quick develop", after or sometimes during first editing.

[johnbeardy]

Don't you ever change your mind about a rating, or think of other keywords that may be appropriate? Even if you try to work in an orderly or linear fashion, it's never so easy.