Community Manager

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P: Ability to export files in the HEIC/HEIF formats

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
August 18, 2018
70 replies
28418 views

Now that HEIC is starting to get some reasonable adoption after iOS 11, it’s great that Lightroom Classic CC can import those files. But it would be even better if it could export them too. For various reasons, I end up exporting from Lightroom to Apple Photos.app, and it seems like a no-brainer for me to use HEIC if Lightroom supported them. (Why not save the extra disk space?)

I know I can export to TIFF or some other lossless format and then use a third-party utility to convert them to HEIC, but that’s too much of a pain. Having native support in the Export workflow would be ideal.

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Rikk Flohr_Photography

Community Manager

Update:

The recent additions of JXL and AVIF formats to Export provided improved quality, fidelity, bit-depth, and file size improvements, largely mitigating the need for this request. At this time, HEIC exports remain 'not planned.'

Rikk Flohr: Adobe Photography Org

H

Hans277969487viw

Participating Frequently

Thanks for the community support. I will try them, especially how HDR will be affected.

The boycott for heif in desktop Raw editing should end. When every phone can write .heif, why not my computer? This is so frustrating.

brockguntersmith

Participant

Updated Automator Folder Action script to convert newly added images to HEIC at whatever quality level you want 👍

I realized that my prior post unfortunately left you with HEIC files that were only created at 80% quality. I am not aware of any way to override that setting when using the built in automator action for converting images. So I went ahead and wrote a more effective shell script that allows you to set the quality level you want and opens the way to change the location where the files get saved and anything else you care to think up. I've tested this as best I can on several of my M1 Macs running macOS Ventura. I'll check and make sure it runs on Sonoma when that finally gets released to the public later on.

## NOTE - this script is written for ZSH which is the default shell in macOS

# set the HEIC compression quality we want to use where 100 is little/no compression and 0 is COMPRESS THE HECK OUT OF IT

# recommended values are 100 if you want no compromise on quality, 90 if you'd like to save a little space, 80 to save quite a bit of space

quality=100

# take the list of files and folders newly added to our watched directory and work on each one in turn

for f in "$@"; do

# check if the file we are currently working on is a file NOT a directory, if so, proceed

if [[ -f $f ]]; then

# Find the file extension, make it lowercase, and test if it is a filetype we want to convert

case "${f:t:e:l}" in

# This can be changed to whatever combination of extension you want to test for

arw|tif|tiff|jpg|jpeg|png|dng)

# This version would save the HEIC file to the same directory as the original file

/usr/bin/sips -s format heic -s formatOptions 100 $f --out ${f%.*}.heic

# This version saves the HEIC files to an HEIC directory one level back

# /usr/bin/sips -s format heic -s formatOptions "$quality" $f --out ${f:h:h}/HEIC/${f:t:r}.heic

# This version saves the HEIC files to directory of your choosing

# /usr/bin/sips -s format heic -s formatOptions "$quality" $f --out "/Users/johnsmith/Pictures/Photos Converted to HEIC/"${f:t:r}.heic

;;

# If the file does not have the proper extension we are looking for, do what you want here

*)

# This prints out (for no one to see) that this file is not what we want

echo "warn: ${f:t} is not a file we can or want to convert to HEIC"

;;

esac

# if the file we were given is a directory, this is not what we want

else

# This prints out (for no one to see) that we don't want to work with directoriesecho "warn: $f is a directory and cannot be converted to an HEIC file"

fi

done

## Useful script informtion

# $f = the filename including full path and extension

# ${f:t} = just the filename without any parent directories

# ${f:t:e} = just the extension from the filename without any parent directories

# ${f:t:e:l} = just the extension from the filename without any parent directories in LOWERCASE

# ${f:t:r} = just the filename without extension or any parent directories

# ${f:h} = the full path to the directory that contains the file

# ${f:h:h} = the full path to the PARENT directory that contains the file

Ryfe

Participating Frequently

Dear @brockguntersmith,

Your post is excellent and super valuable. Thank you.

I do hope the Product Managers from Adobe will read and appreciate how much that is needed and implement HEIC export.

I personnally would even like a "convert and replace" feature as well:

I have thousands of raw files in hundreds of folders
I already edited smy raws long ago (some, more than 10 years ago) and i know 100% that I will not edit them ever again
I would like the feature option to export the selected raw files in HEIC/HEIF and replace the raw files (the HEIF files would then keep the keyword tags and respect the original folder structure)

That would be a killer feature for me

I hope you read us, Adobe

J

josephbelt01

Participant

I would like to save a RAW photo as HEIF (.heic) format. The primary option available seems to be 8-bit JPG. HEIF supports 16-bit color and is much more efficient so that is the preferred export format. At this point it seems wrong to save images as JPG and TIFF is far too big.

JP Hess

Inspiring

At this point, you will have to use the save option to save to whatever formats are available and then use other software to convert it to the format that you prefer.

brockguntersmith

Participant

My temporary Export to HEIC Workflow on macOS:

1. Create a "Folder Action" script in Automator.app that:

Watches for new files saved (exported from LrC) into a folder I call "LrC TIF Exported Photos"
Copies those files to a folder I call "Converted to HEIC from LrC Exported Photo"
Converts the copies of the TIF files into HEIC file format with no change in dimensions and maximum image quality

2. Create/Use an export preset to export your photos to the "LrC TIF Exported Photos" folder where the Automator.app script is watching for new photos to be created/saved

3. Open up your "Converted to HEIC from LrC Exported Photo" folder to see your shiny new HEIC files.

optional: gasp at the small file size and yet still absolutley outstanding image quality

brockguntersmith

Participant

As a wildlife photographer I would like to be able to export to .heic format files so that I can have a smaller file sized rendering of my edited RAW files that still retain some measure of editing information/history, extremely high quality image data, and even transparency in the smaller set of cases that require it.

I respectfully request the addition of HEIC/HEIF as an export file format option when using the following functions (specified as: menu->item::dialog box section->data field)

File->Export::File Settings->Image Format
- add HEIC/HEIF
File->Preferences::External Editing->Image Format
- add HEIC/HEIF

I have attached my own study on file sizes using a small sampling of .ARW files shot on my Sony a1 camera, then exported to JPEG from LrC 12.5 (macos), then converting the .ARW to .HEIC using Apple's "sips" command line utility using the command listed below.

for i in *.ARW; do sips -s format heic -s formatOptions 100 $i --out converted/${i%.ARW}.heic;done

In short, JPEG saved only 37.51% on filesize, while HEIC saved 58.68% and (arguably admittedly) resulted in equal or greater image quality with numerous functional benefits available due to the HEIC file format.

Here is a professional/reputable source of data on just a few of the advantages of providing HEIC (in addition to JPEG which LrC already supports) as an export format for users of Lightroom Classic:

https://www.adobe.com/ca/creativecloud/file-types/image/comparison/heic-vs-jpeg.html

File_Size_Comparison_ARW_JPEG_HEIC.pdf

Ryfe

Participating Frequently

Ok, it's 2023

Please add heif / heic exporting to LR/LR Classic.

cocoua

Known Participant

this is my current workflow, I did an App in Automator so I just dreag the Images to that and this creates a copy or just replaces the original (have 2 apps) in the Finder's toolbar , sadly the default HEIC quality with this system is around 80% and this makes HEIC files a little too much compressed for me...

when compared to the 100% HEIC or 90% from Preview.app the difference is notable

The process is super conveninet as it takes 1 move converting all the images you want, and the process is in the background, but the quality is so so.

At the end, the best worklfow to me is render to PNG 16-bit fom LR, then open them in Preview.app and export to HEIC ~95% quality, I store this way discarted pics form photoshootings in a nice quality at small disk size. I keep the RAW for the good ones and deleted from disk the discarted.

Another problem is Preview.app is saving HEIC at 8-bit

cocoua

Known Participant

the plugin looks great, you jsut need to donload from here:

https://github.com/milch/LRExportHEIC/releases/tag/v1.0.8

Problems are: you must you change the extension after the process and Ph and doesnt recognize the file,

Mediinfo shows the file as heix format (I believe that is HEIC-10bit). Only way I find to open this HEIC in Ph is open it with Preview.app, make some change, undo it and close and then Ph recognizes it as it now is 8-bit HEIC...

after doing so Mediainfo also shows heic file format (8-bit)

So Ph sems not to be compatbile with 10 bit heic (neither do Lr)

PhotoAI opens it and save it as original heic

P

piotrj98775579

Participating Frequently

This is madness, very expensive software with one-year subscription only model (supposedly to speed up software development), and still no basic support for modern image formats after more than **four years**?

Once again, I need some basic functionality that is available in almost all free software, but not in very expensive Adobe products.

Adobe, you are simply pathetic in your business practices.

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