P: Support for HEIC file format (Windows)

[ebigmac]

Support for HEIC file format was included in Lightroom CC but still is needed in Lightroom Classic.  When will it be added?

[HEIC image support was added to LR 7.4 (for Mac OS 10.13 or later) and LR 7.5 (Windows 10).  (We're now at LR 8.2.1.) See https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-cc/kb/heic-files-support.html.  

- John Ellis]

[garyrowe]

Yes, well, they've been hitting a lot of them lately 😉

[garyrowe]

And, as numbers seem to be in for this thread, that 'as explained a few times' turns out to be ..... in fact .... once.

[john beardsworth]

Ha ha. I have explained it more than once, Victoria has explained it at least once. But one number does appear to be rising faster than any other - the number of juvenile posts....

[msp_guy]

263. Happy Friday everyone!

The waiting is the hardest part
Every day you get one more yard
You take it on faith, you take it to the heart
The waiting is the hardest part

[Daniel Oakfield]

I find it weird, to say the least, that there's no official announcement about "we are working on it" or "we don't know if we will do it"... 

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

all my iPhone photos up to 2017 I can edit in Lightroom Classic, but none of the images once I got the iPhone 7 Plus. I don't use Lightroom CC. Come on Adobe, this standard was written in 2015 . Get with it.

[msp_guy]

270. Happy Friday everyone!

Also near as I can tell, HEIF/HEIC support was added to LR CC in mid-October, so call it 135 days ago now. I'll add that to the count 🙂

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I don't see that. My iPhone 7plus images are shot in HEIC. If I add them to Lightroom CC they get converted to JPEG on import.
Furthermore if I instead transfer the HEIC file to my MacBook Pro, the desktop version of Lightroom CC cannot see or add them to the catalog.
This  means Adobe really doesn't yet really support the format even in Lightroom CC.

[msp_guy]

Ah, so even worse than I thought. Thx.

[msp_guy]

277. Happy Friday everyone!

I heard that the Luminar LR competitor might release in mid-May, so let's call it 2 months = 60 days. Might add that to the count, too.

[kuhneng]

Google's getting in on the act - the next major version of Android (P) will support .heif photos. This has to be on Adobe's radar.

[kuhneng]

Yup, nothing like having an "import" perform a lossy compression without telling you.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

It's implemented in Photoshop.
It's implemented in Lightroom CC.

So the code is there, and so is the $ to implement it. From subscribers such as myself who are promised 'extra features and upgrades for subscribing'.

That it's still 'under consideration' for Lightroom Classic' tells you how much Adobe want to invest in Lightroom Classic - as little as possible. It's clearly a dying product, and Adobe hope people switch to Lightroom CC before they get to wise and jump ship to another company.

It's appalling.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Actually it is not implemented in Lightroom CC. You can't import HEIC photos into Lightroom CC on the desktop, and any images imported on mobile devices just get converted to JPEG.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

My understanding is:
 - Photoshop - Yes
 - Lightroom CC - Yes
 - Lightroom CC Classic - No

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

David Sanger's understanding is correct. This isn't a sign of a dying product. It's a sign of a brand new file format that has all sorts of technical and legal ramifications.

[msp_guy]

In that case I wonder why on earth they can't just do a quick blog post, tweet or something to let us know. "Hey everyone, we know you want to have all your iphone photos as part of your main catalog. We're working as hard as we can but there are some legal issues that will still take X weeks to clear up". 

On another forum I saw Tom Hogarty say they were trying to get more engaged & transparent with the community but so far I have not seen evidence of that.

In addition, Luminar 2018 already supports it. I'd be hard pressed to believe they have better engineers and resources than Adobe.

[Mr. Dmitry]

It's clearly obvious that they have better engineers.

[Mr. Dmitry]

If a new format is so hard for your developers - use freelancers 🙂 Or better hire more qualified developers and management.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I stand corrected.
Which really doesn't change the situation (our complaint). That there is no support for it in Lightroom CC classic is a cause of angst, for those wishing to incorporate it in their workflow.
As to my other comments (it's a dying product) and those of others (that the delay for implementing this is difficult to believe) - I'll keep this thread open and revisit it in the coming months.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I stand corrected.
Which really doesn't change the situation (our complaint). That there is no support for it in Lightroom CC classic is a cause of angst, for those wishing to incorporate it in their workflow.
As to my other comments (it's a dying product) and those of others (that the delay for implementing this is difficult to believe) - I'll keep this thread open and revisit it in the coming months.

[msp_guy]

270 / 53 until Luminar. Happy Friday everyone!

I wonder why motivation for change might be low 😉

[jtimmes]

The stock graph says it all, there's not enough users pushing for innovation in Lightroom Classic to move the needle.  For the record, I'm another big Lightroom Classic user who doesn't want my giant catalog in the cloud, and I also need HEIC support.

Since there's no clear expectation of when this feature may show up, does anyone out there know of a credible alternative?  Something that can genuinely compete with Lightroom Classic in terms of features and scalability, nondestructive workflows, and is showing more active investment by the company?  I'd consider an alternative, but I don't know of anything that really stacks up at this point...

[smq100]

Lack of HEIC support in LR Classic is increasingly is looking like a pure marketing decision, albeit a poor one. Technically, it's not a difficult feature to add, and I don't believe it's a greed or spite issue as some here have suggested. 

Since HEIC is supported on LR CC (sort of), it appears they using this feature hole in LR Classic to aggressively push Classic users to the move to the cloud. Oddly, the LR powers-that-be have ignored the fact that LR CC is not at all ready for professionals & power users with many, many terabytes of media. Surely, they must have industry advisors that would have known this. 

Adobe products are generally very good and I respect the overarching decision to move LR to a multi-platform, cloud-based system. The product roadmap here is just too aggressive and LR CC is simply not yet ready or it and the upgraded cloud storage costs are too expensive. 

I began to suspect shenanigans within LR marketing the moment they announced LR was being renamed "Classic." <insert eye roll here> 

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I (given my background) should have known better than to imbed myself with any one companies product. I should never have started using the catalog features of lightroom, from whence it's so hard to extract myself (but ultimately, if I don't, it will be worse in the future.) Lesson learnt, again.

So now I begin to unwind my catalog, and I'll implement something that will not be dependent on any company product. Probably just a file based and / or exif based system. It won't be as useful, but no more will I be at the whim of some company decision to change direction to somewhere I'm not happy to take the ride.