When culling/developing photos, I sometimes do not remember that a bunch shots of apparently the same scene are part of a panorama I want to process with Hugin before Darktable, and realize this after I have been treating them as shots of the same scene, which I need to select from.
Is there a technique to keep track of these in the camera?
My low-tech solution is to first make a shot of my hand pointing to the right: , take the panorama shots, and then after I finish a thumbs-up shot of my hand, filling most of the frame so it is hard to miss. So when I see my hands I know these are for merging.
Yeah, thatās basically what I do, maybe even more low-tech in that I just stick my hand in front of the lens, before and after the sequence. Iāve also shot frames at a 45 degree angle as āflagsā. The only thing to remember is, if Iām auto-bracketing to disable that before taking the āflagā shots or I end up with three of each.
I think your solution with hand pointing in the direction is quite nice. I sometimes start the series with a shot of my feet
Shameless plug: auto detection of groups of overlapping images is a feature of Xpano (see here an example run on 200 images: Xpano 0.7.0 - a panorama stitching app built with OpenCV - YouTube), though it wonāt help you export the groups right now, nor does it do raws. I was thinking at one point about loading the raw preview images + export of groups for exactly this usecase, but havenāt gotten around to it.
Within my camera I did not find a sufficient solution. My camera had the function to create new image folders on the sd-card manually which I did many times before making a set of panorama images. But for that I had to enter the menu and navigate to that feature which was too uncomfortable and time-consuming.
Next idea was making an image with my hand in front of the camera before I take a new set.
Since I shoot in manual mode I take some images to adjust my camera settings for the panorama. For these test-shots I hold the camera diagonal:
The first image is the (last) test image for my camera settings. I mark this as ārejectedā and delete it after I developed all panorama images. The next 12 images for the first panorama are marked with one color. The last two pictures are the next panorama and are marked with another color.
Thatās my typical workaround to group images. I wish I could program one of the programmable keys on my camera to create a new folder on the sd-card with a click of a button, but unfortunately thatās not possible.
I always forget the hand signs, therefore I never know which of my photographs were meant for panos, focus stacks or hdr. But I wish my camera had a panorama mode which switches off the af and temporarily locks all exposure settings to the last reading. This in combination with automatic metadata that tags these shots would be a killer feature for me.
, take the panorama shots, and then after I finish a thumbs-up shot of my hand, 
filling most of the frame so it is hard to miss. So when I see my hands I know these are for merging.
and