Hello, I have purchased a couple Lightroom plugins for my windows system, can I also use them on Mac since they are plugins? Or is it just like software that is system specific?
Nearly all LR plugins will run on both Windows and Mac. A few support only one platform (typically because they invoke external programs), but their web sites should warn you about that.
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Good to know. It seems it varies based on what the plugin does and perhaps its interface. I see quite a lot of plugins that do support both platforms, but where you do have to download a platform specific version. All the Alloyphoto.com plugins, for example.
Most plugin developers include Mac and Windows support in the same .lrplugin bundle -- it's easier for the developer and, even for plugins that include platform-specific binaries, the combined downloads are pretty small. I don't know why Vlad at Alloyphoto prefers to have separate downloads.
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Aha, that explains it. The code is platform specific like I thought it would be, but the plugin bundle is usually what Apple called a 'fat binary' (when they changed processors from Motorola to Intel).
Technically, most of the code of most plugins is written in Lua (the language used to implement LR itself). Compiled Lua runs on both Mac and Windows without change. Many plugins don't have any check for Mac versus Windows, relying on LR's pretty good platform-independent SDK. Some plugins will have a small amount of Lua code "if on windows ... else ...". And fewer plugins run external programs bundled inside the plugin, and most of them will include both the Mac and Windows versions of those external programs (e.g. Exiftool or Imagemagick).
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