LrC014 – All Photos Really

Revised 6/26/2023
www.DanHartfordPhoto.com

SITUATION

When LrC (Lightroom Classic) shows a folder of images or the “All Photographs” special collection it does not display images that are buried in collapsed stacks.  Of course that’s the purpose of having stacks so this should not be a surprise.  But it is misleading when you select the “All Photographs” item in the Catalog panel as the name implies that you’ll get all photographs and that is not necessarily what you get.

In the screen shot below, you will notice that the “All Photographs” special collection indicates that there are 105,160 photos known to LrC.  But after selecting “All Photographs” and then selecting all the images in the grid, the count at the top of the film strip show that there are only 50,107 images being shown.  What happened to the other 55,053 images?

02 Screenshot 1

Well, the answer is that when you have image stacks, the images buried in collapsed stacks are not shown when you select the “All Photographs” special collection or one or more folders.  In most situations this is desirable as the reason you put images into stacks and collapsed those stacks was to hide all but the first image in the stack as they are for the most part redundant with the top image.  In other words “out of sight, out of mind”.  But, there are times when you actually do want to see “ALL” the images regardless of their stack participation. 

Let’s say you select a folder which contains stacks of images and most or all of those stacks are collapsed such that you are only seeing the top image of each stack.  Now, let’s say you want to use a LR filter on the filter bar to only see the images with a rating of 3 or more stars as shown below

02 Stacked 3 star

As it turns out, the top left stack contains 3 images that have 3 or more stars however, only one of those images is showing. It is also the case that even if a stack contains several 3 star images but the top image of the collpased stack is not 3 or more stars, none of those iamges will be seen. 

The same thing happens if you filter on anything else.  In the screen shot below I want to see all my images that have the keyword “Moat”.  So, I click on the right facing arrow to the right of the keyword “Moat” in the Keyword List Panel.  This sets a keyword filter in the filter bar above the grid and selects the “All Photographs” set of images in the Catalog panel. 

In the Keyword list it shows me that I have 4 images with the keyword “Moat”.  So why am I only seeing 2 images in the grid when I am using “All Photographs” as my working set of images and I have a filter for keyword “Moat”? 

The answer is that 2 of the 4 images with that keyword are buried in collapsed stacks making them invisible to the filter.  This is a problem as I want to see all 4.

01 Moat 2

The intuitive solution is to expand all the stacks so those other two images are no longer hidden.  This does work, but if you have many thousands of images in hundreds or thousands of stacks this “Expand All Stacks” operation could take awhile.  In addition, let’s say you spent much time collapsing some stacks and leaving other stacks expanded for some purpose.  If you “Expand All” then you’ve lost that work.

Note 1: This problem does not exist if you have selected multiple sources at least one of which is a collection.

Note 2:  Stacks can be created only from images in a single folder or from images in a single collection and stacking in a folder is independent of stacking in a collection.  This article is related to stacking in folders.

There are basically 3 solutions to this problem. The best is #3 so you may want to just skip down to that one and ignore the first 2.

Solution 1 (obvious)

The first solution to this problem (once you understand what is going on) is quite simple.  Just select all the images in the grid and issue the “expand all stacks” command.  This command can be found by right clicking (<Ctrl>Click on a Mac) on any of the images and selecting “Stacking” then “Expand all stacks” or by using the “Stacking” item in the “Photo” menu. 

Of course this method may take some time if you’re expanding tens of thousands of images and if you have deliberately left some stacks collapsed and others expanded they will now all be expanded. 

Solution 2 (Smart Collection)

This solution is better than #1 but no where near as good as #3.  So, you may want to just skip ahead to #3.

This solution comes in the form of a Smart Collection.  The downside of this one is that it is difficult to restrict the result to only a set of folders and/or collections but if you’re after your entire catalog of images then it works OK.  As it turns out collections ignore folder stacking when displaying images.  So, what we want is a Smart Collection that selects all images.  Here is such a Smart Collection

03 Screenshot 2

This Smart Collection has a single rule which selects all photos where the star rating is >= 0 stars.  In other words, every photo. 

If I click on this Smart Collection rather than the standard All Photographs special collection I now get them all.

01 Screenshot 3

Now you can see that the Smart Collection is providing all 105,160 images as the current source.  Of course, the same as with the “All Photographs” special collection, you can still narrow down your selection through the use of the filter bar but you are working with the entire set of images – including those buried in stacks.

Solution 3 (Regular Collection)

This solution is the best of the bunch.  Not only is it quick and easy but it can be used on one or more folders and collections as well as your entire catalog of images.

Setup:  – This is a one time setup step.  Go to the collections panel on the left and click the “+” sign to the right of the word “Collections”.  In the resulting pop up, select “Create Collection…”

04 Screenshot 4
 

In the Create Collection dialog box, name the collection something like “Empty Collection”.  You can choose to put it in a collection set if you like but leave all the other checkboxes unchecked.  Then press the “Create” button at the bottom right.
 

05 Screenshot 5

You now have a collection that contains no images.

Usage: When you have a grid full of images where the source of those images is one or more folders and/or collections or the “All Photographs” item in the Catalog Panel, and you want to see images that are in collapsed stacks, <ctrl>click (Win) or <Cmd>click (Mac) on this “Empty Collection” collection to add this empty collection to the sources already selected and instantly the images buried in stacks will show up assuming they meet any filter criteria you may have in place.  That’s it!

Example:  Let’s say I’m looking at folder “2009-02a – Yosemite” and I have a filter turned on for Keywords Contain “waterfall”.  Of the 286 images in that folder, my grid displays 22 waterfall images

06 Screenshot 6

But, almost every one of those waterfall images are the top image of a stack.  If I now want to see all the waterfall images in that folder, stacked or not, all I do is hold down the <Ctrl> (<Cmd> on Mac) key and click on the “Empty Collection” collection.

Now I have folder “2009-02a – Yosemite” as well as the “Empty Collection” collection both selected as sources of the images.   And, my grid now shows all 79 images in the Yosemite folder that have the keyword “Waterfall”, regardless of stacking status.

07 Screenshot 7

<Ctrl>Click (<Cmd>click on Mac) on the “Empty Collection” folder again and the images buried in the collapsed stacks disappear.

Final Comment

You’ve made it to the end of this long and detailed article.  I hope you found it informative and useful and that it addressed whatever it was that led you here.  If you’ve stumbled upon any errors, omissions, or things that could be presented better, please let me know by leaving a comment.

You may have noticed as you read through this article that you were not required to logon or to create an account.  I did not ask for a credit card number. You did not have to provide an email address or phone number.  You were not bombarded with pop up ads.  I did not lure you part way into the article and then tell you to pay for a subscription to get the rest. 

Nobody paid me to write this article.  I have no sponsors.  I have no advertisers.  I spend many, many hours (days. weeks or months) researching, testing, and writing articles such as this one to help folks such as yourself and to attract people to my web site where they may be inclined to utilize my one-on-one Lightroom Classic Training or Lighroom Help consulting services. 

So, I am going to ask you for a favor.  Please spend a few minutes and leave a thoughtful comment.  That’s it!  If you feel especially motivated also post a review on Google and/or Yelp for “Dan Hartford Photo”.  Free to you, very helpful to me.