Stacking: RAW+JPEG photos are not always stacking

[JackBlant]

When storing photos taken on my Pixel 8 which are taken in RAW+JPEG mode, they are sometimes stacked correctly, likely by the 'Meta' function - however, more often than not, they are not stacked.

When these photos are taken, both a .jpeg and a .RAW image is stored. As a result, there is a small time difference between the images due to processing of the files - the size of the difference seems to vary a little.
On the occasions where this difference is very small (within 1 second as documented) , the images are stacked - however when they fall outside of this very tight window, they are not stacked.

The naming convention used by the pixel camera produces the following files:

• PXL_20250126_164931991.RAW-01.COVER.jpg
• PXL_20250126_164931991.RAW-02.ORIGINAL.dng

These seem too different to be stacked by the sequential filter also?

One solution may be to add in a configuration setting, to allow fine tuning of the time window permitted by the 'Meta' filter to determine if the images are related or not. (I have spent quite a bit of time looking through the code / config files, but have to admit I failed to figure out how this function worked and got the '1 second' filter from)

There may be some other sensible logic to class these images as related however.. I noticed the photo sync app always correctly stacks these images without fail (perhaps using the naming scheme?) If photoprism had a way of identifying the 'COVER' and 'ORIGINAL' markers, with otherwise the same name and treating these as being the same image?

[graciousgrey]

Thank you for your feedback!

You can find the currently supported name patterns here:

https://docs.photoprism.app/user-guide/settings/library/#which-sequential-naming-patterns-are-supported

One solution may be to add in a configuration setting, to allow fine tuning of the time window permitted by the 'Meta' filter to determine if the images are related or not.

We do have a related feature request already, feel free to leave a 👍 in there

• Stacks: Option to configure the time threshold used to stack timelapse photos #1446

[blarrbot]

Sorry to necro, but figured I'd help people coming here from Google trying to solve this issue.

Assuming you are using Photosync, you can fix this with Photosync. Just got your Settings > Configure > Photoprism > Photoprism > Upload Settings > File Names > Change from Original Name to Recording Time. Other options should work as well as long as it names the files exactly the same aside from the extension, but this is what I use. This will properly name the files like Google should have been doing from the get-go, e.g. instead of your example PXL_20250126_164931991.RAW-01.COVER.jpg and PXL_20250126_164931991.RAW-02.ORIGINAL.dng, it will change the names to 20250126_164931991.jpg and 20250126_164931991.dng, just like any professional camera would do automatically, and per the documentation, Photoprism will correctly identify it as having the same name but differing extensions, stack it, and have the added benefit of not creating a redundant sidecar file, which it will often do even if the stack is successful due to the vastly differing original file names.

edit: i found that this sometimes causes stacks to fail. shutter on pixel 9 pro causes some delay when using raw+jpeg and the full sensor resolution. it's rare, but sometimes this will cause the timestamp to be off by a second and the stack will fail as the names will end with e.g. 58 and 59 for the jpeg and raw respectively. i tried playing with photosync's custom naming, but there doesn't seem to be any way to guarantee the file names will always be the same for a matching raw+jpeg. currently, i'm just dealing with those rare ones on a case-by-case and manually correcting the filenames to have the same name before importing. not great, but it's fine until a solution is found by photoprism.