Although Aperture has offered stacks all along, it’s a feature that I personally haven’t used a lot. But last week I was doing a lot of spring flower photography and experimenting with narrow depth of fields. In some cases I wanted to combine a series of those shots using software such as Helicon focus . So I’ll tell you about my missteps in hopes that they save you some grief.

I went through and labeled some of the images with various numbers of stars, and then organized some of them into stacks. I made sure to give the first image in the stack 4 or 5 stars to remind myself that I wanted to use that stack and then closed the stacks.

I continued sorting through my images and applying ratings. When finished, I set the filter to show only the 4 or 5 star images. I was all set to start to use those stacks and create the depth of field composites. Although several of my stacks appeared, I couldn’t open them. Instead I’d see the dark background, indicative of a stack, and an icon indicating something like 1 of 6. From the title of this blog and the way I’ve written it, you probably know what the issue was ... the filter was blocking the other unrated, or lesser rated images from displaying. Honestly - this is logical behavior on Aperture’s part, but it did have me perplexed for awhile.

The better workflow is to create the stacks first, close the stack and then apply a rating to the stack. That way when you apply the filter, the stacks appear and you can open them as expected.

I have to admit that when scanning through a project, seeing similar images stacked together gives a far more organized, less overwhelming view. However, I’m probably going to limit stacks to those images that I want to use for a composite. Otherwise it might become far too easy to forget to delete similar pictures that I don’t need. That clutter is kind of an annoying, but useful reminder to cleanup and delete images I don’t need. (I’m the kind of person who leaves the clutter on my desk to remind me what I need to do, rather than carefully filing everything away so that I can quickly forget about it!) If you’re more disciplined than I am, you might like using stacks more often.

One other thing I want to mention is that Josh and I just announced a workshop to photograph Northern Lights and Fall tundra. Seeing, let alone photographing, an aurora is an awesome experience. Details are available at my website www.ellenanon.com