Lightroom Classic HDR Export - how to see in Google Drive

[nickjacksonphotography]

Hi all, I've read the threads on this so am aware that viewing of the HDR changes in LR depends on your computer/phone capability (and whether you can use XL/AVIF etc).

My question is slightly different. I need to save my HDR edited images on Google Drive for a client. If I export as JPEG it doesn't show the HDR change, XL/AVIF/TIF do show the HDR changes but aren't compatible with Google Drive preview so therefore not useful for the client.

If I save as TIF and batch change to JPG the HDR changes are retained. However I'm guessing that there's a pretty obvious reason not to do this (such as loss of quality)? Is that the case, or is this a long-winded solution until HDR compatibility improves? Also weirdly when I batch save as JPG from TIF, half of the images come throught about 8mb, but the other half are 30+mb JPGs. All came from the same size TIFs and were consecutive shots on the day with the same settings. Any ideas why this might be happening?

Thank you LR Community, and I am new so apologies if this is a daft question 😉

Nick

[nickjacksonphotography]

I actually had a follow up question too (which may be more daft). Is there a reason why I can't just change the filename of an image from "TIF" to "JPG"? It seems to then allow google drive upload and doesn't seem to corrupt or massively impact the quality of the file.

[John R Ellis]

"Is there a reason why I can't just change the filename of an image from "TIF" to "JPG"?"

Many apps determine the type of a file by looking at the file extension, and they will get confused if the extension is .jpg but the contents are TIFF.

Some apps look at the contents of the file to determine the file type. So if you change the extension from .tif to .jpg, they'll still treat the file as a TIFF and properly display it. But that could be very confusing when you look at the file later and try to open it in other apps that just look at the extension.

Moral of the story: Changing the file extension results in madness.