Helicon Soft Forum

I have several Olympus cameras that do in-camera focus stacking; they stack in camera, but also provide the single exposures for later, better stacking in external software.

Unfortunately Olympus opted for a certain order taking the pictures: if you have e.g. a eight picture stacking sequence, the first is the one where the camera is currently focused on. The next three are taken nearer to that focus plane, the last four farther away. The correct stacking sequence then is:

2-3-4-1-5-6-7-8

If I load the stacking pictures of such a sequence into Helicon I can't seem to rearrange their order; they can be sorted ascending, descending or automatically (the latter analyzing the pictures and determining if ascending or descending it is). As a workaround I can rename the first pic to something like "filenameof#3" + "a" to insert it in the correct order, but with multiple stacks that is very time consuming. It would be much easier just to drag the first picture in the filelist to fourth place, but I can't figure out any way to do so.

Am I overlooking a possibility to manually sort the source pictures directly in Helicon?

And I do know that some Olympus cameras offer focus bracketing which produces a normal ascending sequence. But if I use the quick focus stacking option I have a good indicator if a hand held sequence is probably okay for stacking (in this case the in-camera stacking succeeds), so I like to use it often. Also some cameras can't provide a sequential order at all, like the OM Pen EP-7.

Thanks for any help on this!

Phil

Why not relabel them in your folder?
Make a copy of the folder.
Rename them 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Then import them into HF

Hi Phil,

There is no way to reorder the images, they are always sorted by file name.
Is there any data related to the focal distance in the EXIF?

el48tel wrote: 27.04.2026 17:29 Why not relabel them in your folder?
Make a copy of the folder.
Rename them 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Then import them into HF

Thanks for your reply! But as I said in my OP this is time consuming process. Of course it can be done (and I do it), but rearranging the files in Helicon would be much faster, especially with multiple stacks.

Phil

Catherine wrote: 27.04.2026 18:25 Hi Phil,

There is no way to reorder the images, they are always sorted by file name.
Is there any data related to the focal distance in the EXIF?

Thanks for your answer!

I looked at the raw files with EXIFtool, and there sure is focal distance data in the maker's section: the item "FocusStepCount" gives a precise four digit number, and the item "FocusDistance" states the focal distance in meters with three digits after the decimal point, like 0.165 m. I do think that "FocusStepCount" is the easier one to sort by and the more precise one.

I also found a way to rename the files using Exiftool to include the value of the "FocusStepCount" field in the file name; but this isn't really a solution either, because the timestamp also has to be included in the file name to define the stacking group; since most times not all the pictures in a stack are taken in the same second the final order is still by time taken and not by focus step count. You can of course move the stacks in seperate folders and then delete the timestamp from the filenames (Exiftools allows that too), but then its just simpler and quicker to manually rename the first picture of a stack so it will be inserted in the correct position. Depending on the number of pics in the stack that can be at varying positions, making things complicated again.

Most comfortable solution would be Helicon recognizing the "FocusStepCount" and/or the "FocusDistance" field, and if it finds data there, offering to order the files either by filename or by focus distance. Maybe an option like that could be incorporated in a future release?

Since Olympus/OM Systems cameras are very popular for stacking and a lot of them use that convoluted order either for in-camera focus stacking (e.g. OM-1, OM-3) or in-camera focus bracketing (Pen E-P7) it would IMO be a welcome addition for of a lot of people.

Phil

You can ask your favorite AI chatbot to create a python script to rename the files for you... I have a script that renames all the files in a directory to put them in the right order. P924345.jpg becomes F001_P924345.jpg etc.

That was my general idea too. Based on what are you renaming them?
I passed this info to our developers and they're thinking about it, it was my understanding they want to allow manual reordering but it depends on how much work it would be to implement in the interface. We could also read the tags and use for sorting, but I assume every camera vendor and maybe model line has different tags.

Yeah if you're not going to rely on metadata, then you have to know what order your camera uses when shooting... My Panasonic has a setting I like for focus stacking, which shoots in the following order: 0, -1, +1, -2, +2, -3, +3, etc. So my script (it's written in Perl, but could easily be done in Python too) reorders the image files knowing that. Example:

[Grogu:~/Pictures/stack] matt% ls -l source
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 matt staff 0 May 10 16:41 p0001.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 matt staff 0 May 10 16:41 p0002.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 matt staff 0 May 10 16:41 p0003.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 matt staff 0 May 10 16:41 p0004.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 matt staff 0 May 10 16:41 p0005.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 matt staff 0 May 10 16:41 p0006.jpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 matt staff 0 May 10 16:41 p0007.jpg
[Grogu:~/Pictures/stack] matt% ./reorder.pl source
[Grogu:~/Pictures/stack] matt% ls -l source
total 0
-rw-r--r--@ 1 matt staff 0 May 10 16:41 F000_p0007.jpg
-rw-r--r--@ 1 matt staff 0 May 10 16:41 F001_p0005.jpg
-rw-r--r--@ 1 matt staff 0 May 10 16:41 F002_p0003.jpg
-rw-r--r--@ 1 matt staff 0 May 10 16:41 F003_p0001.jpg
-rw-r--r--@ 1 matt staff 0 May 10 16:41 F004_p0002.jpg
-rw-r--r--@ 1 matt staff 0 May 10 16:41 F005_p0004.jpg
-rw-r--r--@ 1 matt staff 0 May 10 16:41 F006_p0006.jpg

The code for anyone who's curious:

Thanks all for your input and replies!

I have to point out that renaming the files using metadata for focus distance or by known picture order of a stack is only a solution if you know the boundaries of your stack or just have an isolated single stack.

My everyday experience is the following: I'm out there with my Olympus/OM camera doing a lot of stacks, sometimes in quick succession. All stacks are saved in the same standard folder on the SD card (Sony's stacking implementation creates different folders for each stack, but not Olympus/OM).

For successful automatic renaming I'd now need a script capable of not only renaming the files by metadata focus distance information (that is already possible using ExifTools) or by the known order they have been taken, but also capable of isolating the single stacks. Olympus/OM cameras stack very fast, but very often the single pictures of a stack don't have an identical time stamp because not all pictures were taken in the same second or minute. So no chance as I see it to identify the stack by time stamp, thus no possibility IMO for automatic stack identification and renaming.

OTOH it's rather easy in my experience to isolate a stack and identify the single pictures of this stack by their previews. So it's a no-brainer to simply grab the found picture sequence e.g. in Windows Explorer and drag it into Helicon. Then the problem I originally described occurs - since manual reordering in Helicon is not possible.

Thanks, Catherine, for suggesting a manual ordering option to the developers; that would be the easiest solution to my problem IMO.

The "luxury version" would of course offer an automatic sorting for the pictures loaded. I made a quick AI based search and the results suggested that the "standard EXIF:SubjectDistance" field is rarely used (maybe e.g. by Leica cameras), but a "FocusDistance" field in the makers section is used more often - at least by some manufacturers, especially by Nikon and OM/Olympus cameras. The more precise "FocusStepCount" in the makers sections seems to be used by both Panasonic and OM/Olympus cameras. According to that it could be worth while to look at those three fields:

Standard Exif: "SubjectDistance"
Makers Section: "FocusStepCount"
Makers Section: "FocusDistance"

An algorithm description for automatic sorting could be:

1. Look if there are entries in EXIF:SubjectDistance in all pictures loaded. If so, check if pictures loaded are already sorted by those values. If not offer to sort the loaded pictures by those values via UI dialog. End.

2. If there are no entries in EXIF:SubjectDistance, look if there are entries in MakersSection: FocusStepCount in all pictures loaded. If so, check if pictures loaded are already sorted by those values. If not, offer to sort loaded pictures by those values via UI dialog. End.

3. If there are no entries in MakersSection: FocusStepCount, look if there are entries in MakersSection: FocusDistance in all pictures loaded. If so, check if pictures loaded are already sorted by those values. If not, offer to sort loaded pictures by those values via UI dialog. End.

Of course you could replace individual UI dialogs with a general option applying automatic sorting if entries in the fields - in the order shown - are found. If there are no entries in any of the three fields (or if those fields can't be found), then simply nothing happens.

Just a thought!

Phil

Just checking in to see if there is any news on this by HeliconSoft/Catherine?

Thanks for your update!

Phil

Hi Phil,

Nothing in the works right in that area. I think the best for now is pre-ordering the files correctly. If you know how to sort your files based on metadata, ask an LLM (AI) to write a script for you that does just that. Or ask it to dress it up in a runnable application for convenience, or a that can bulk-sort the images across multiple stacks or whatever you might need. Describe the tags you figured out and it will easily do the job. The tags are vendor-specific, and potentially model-specific, so there is no universal solution we can incorporate internally.