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

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

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.

[Benjamin34616947orjp]

Mr. Flohr,

I am now running ios 18's beta and the .JXL format is completely unusable after exporting from Lightroom.  Like it's TRASHED!  Avif has limited functionality, so what does Adobe plan to do to keep Apple subscribers?

[Lumigraphics]

AVIF and JPEGXL can be converted pretty easily on the Mac, but refusing to support HEIC is ridiculous.

[nunyanunya]

I believe the HEIF format is more compact and efficient, and that Lightroom mobile should be able to support it.

[matthornstein]

How do you convert it in a way that it shows up properly on the photos app?

So far all the conversions I did never look the same way it in the Develop module

[patrikk4249813]

Dear Rikk,

how can you seriously claim that it's obsolete to bring HEIF export to Lightroom. HEIF is the standard picture format on Apple platforms and Apple is the standard platform for photographers. All cameras support it. It's also the most efficient and it keeps image information that is getting lost in JPEG. We all shoot raw and then export to Apple photos app and we're forced to lose image quality, after having spent hours and hours and days and weeks into taking beautiful pictures and then editing them. How can you say that we don't need this? What you're claiming is like saying we don't need colour displays, when we have black and white. A very worrysome comment that sounds like denial of reality. HEIF formats are LONG overdue. Lightroom is losing ground anyways to several other photo apps. Why don't you want to listen to customers? I have always been a lightroom fan, but maybe I should also look elsewhere...

I hope you change course.

thanks P

[patrikk4249813]

To be precise, we need the .HIF format. As opposed to AVIF it can store more metadata and .HIFs are in many szenarios better than .AVIFs although they are "only" 10Bit vs 12 Bit colours

[Seawabear]

Well said! The AVIF vs HEIF fight reminds me of Flash vs HTML5. Apple will WIN! Adobe, follow your customers, not your ego or patent strategy.

[Steffen1970]

Dear Rikk,

Nice to be in touch again. I think you have a point (although i must say that the new JXL format is new to many of us and thus, i gave up after experimenting with the quality level, ie, i've found that a significant reduction in the file size compared to JPEG was associated with some artefacts...).

But i would also like to echo the sentiment among many fellow, often very longtime Lightroom users (in my case since version 0.x) that Adobe could try to find a better balance between staking out novel directions and at the same time listening to its customer base.

A point to illustrate this: when Nikon switched to the Z mount, Adobe took a backseat and (automatically) implemented whatever profile came out of the cameras. Me and many others kept complaining for years (!) that the Nikon provided/embedded profiles are FAR inferior to what Adobe provided before for pre-Z mount lenses (vignetting for instance is still super visible with Z mount lenses whereas this was perfectly corrected before) - so for me as paying customer (every month), the quality has actually degraded... plus you Rikk informed me in another thread (which has been deleted since then...) that Adobe is aware of this and is working on a fix. This announcement was now 4 years ago... not quite super customer friendly if i may say so?