P: Exporting HDR images into the Apple ecosystem

[lnackman]

I use Lightroom for editing and managing all of my photographs. I'm now using the new HDR support for almost all of my work and it generally works well. That said, my family and friends generallly share photos via Apple's Photos app, specifically via shared albums. Exporting HDR images from Lightroom and putting them directly into an Apple shared album works poorly -- the images do not have HDR when viewed from the shared album. I've found a way to do this that works (below), but it is terribly clunky. Lightroom needs a smooth way to export HDR images into Apple shared albums.

After lots of experimentation, here's what I do, which works, but is a lot of work: (1) export from LR to an AVIF with HDR info; (2) on a Mac, convert to HEIC; (3) on an iPhone using the Files app put the HEIC file into the Photos library; (4) in the Photos app on either Mac or iPhone, copy the image into the desired shared album. Perhaps the easiest way for this to work (from your customers' perspective) is to be able to export an Apple-compaitible HEIC file directly from Lightroom.

Thanks.

[Jim Wilde]

I very rarely use Photos on either my MBP or iPhone/iPad, and I've never used Apple's Shared Photos. Having said that, I just exported a couple of HDR-enabled images from LrM on iPhone to the Device using JPG output with the HDR option enabled. When then opening the Photos app, the exported images were displayed with the HDR content.

I repeated the exercise on my MBP, again exporting using JPG format (which now appears to have HDR enabled by default), and the exported files when viewed with Preview again displayed HDR correctly. I also imported the JPGs into the Photos app, and again they displayed the HDR correctly. 

So I would have thought that any Photos Shared Album should also display those JPGs correctly (provided of course that the album is displayed in an HDR-capable browser such as Chrome).

and from LrD on my MBP to the Desktop

[lnackman]

Yes, the problem specifically occurs when putting HDR images in Shared Albums. What you describe also works fine for me too into my Photos library. There is evidently some undocumented processing done when putting an image into a shared album (Apple doc talks about reducing maximum dimension of an edge to 2048 pixels, but it seems that other processing is happening  too).

In my scenario, family members are viewing images in the Photos app so there's no browser involved. 

[Jim Wilde]

As far as I can tell, Preview and Photos now support JPG, AVIF and JXL HDR formats, so it's a little surprising that the Apple Shared Albums do not. Presumably you've also contacted Apple about this issue?

[lnackman]

Yes, with the latest MacOS and iOS updates, support for HDR is good in Preview, Safari, and mostly in Photos. The "mostly" qualifier for Photos is specifically about support in Photo's Shared Albums. It works well with images created with Apple's Camera app and only edited in Photos. But it is flaky with HDR images edited in Lightroom and then exported. For example, I can import an AVIF exported by Lightroom into my Photos library and it is fine. But if I then add that imported photo into a Shared Album with some images it works fine and with others the colors are wrong. On the other hand, if I first convert the exported AVIF to an HEIC using the builtin tools on Mac and iOS then import that HEIC into the Photos library and then add that image into a Shared Album it always works fine if I do that on my phone but doesn't keep the HDR info if I do that on my Mac. 

So, yes, I should contact Apple because they have bugs in the way they handle things that should, to use their slogan, just work. I'll do that.

On the other hand, Adobe and Apple are two of the major photo ecosystems. As a customer of both companies, I expect them to make important use cases across their two ecosystem work. Adobe has done some of that on the mobile versions of LR but not on the Mac version.

Thanks for your advice and pushing me toward more clarity on this.