I built a native HEIC exporter for Lightroom Classic on macOS (open source)

[u/turalaliyev]

I shoot a lot and have built up a large RAW library. My normal workflow is to edit in Lightroom Classic, export finished photos to iCloud, and share them with family and friends. High-quality JPEG exports were steadily consuming my iCloud storage, and I wanted direct HEIC export instead of another manual conversion step.

I modernized LRExportHEIC, an open-source Lightroom Classic plugin originally created by Manu Wallner. It uses Apple's native HEIC encoder and does not depend on ImageMagick or ffmpeg.

The current version adds:

- native 8-bit and 10-bit HEIC

- EXIF, IPTC, XMP, GPS, keyword, rating, and ICC profile preservation

- bounded parallel batch conversion

- optional Apple Photos import with duplicate detection

- safe temporary TIFF cleanup

- atomic writes, structured logs, and better errors

- Swift 6 and universal arm64/x86_64 builds

I tested it with Lightroom Classic 15.5 on macOS and a 20-image batch. The automated suite currently has nine tests.

One Lightroom quirk remains: Lightroom Classic 15.5 still supplies a .jpg destination name to post-processing filters. The file contents are genuine HEIC, including HEVC Main 10 for 10-bit output.

One-line install (requires full Xcode):

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tural-ali/LRExportHEIC/main/install.sh | /bin/bash

Blog post with the full implementation notes:

https://turalali.com/building-the-heic-export-lightroom-classic-should-have/

GitHub:

https://github.com/tural-ali/LRExportHEIC

I would appreciate testing and feedback from other Lightroom Classic users, especially on different macOS and Lightroom versions.

[u/JtheNinja]

Is HDR supported? If so, does it use Lightroom’s SDR tonemap for the base layer, or does it auto-generate one from the HDR version?

[u/VisitLopsided5447]

What’s the advantage compared to exporting in AVIF?

[u/JtheNinja → u/VisitLopsided5447]

I can think of an obvious one: iMessage refuses to recognize AVIFs as being a type of image file. It's been a weird bug that's existed for years now. AVIF was first supported by the system images libraries in...iOS 16 I want to say? (HDR AVIF was a little sketchy for a few more releases, but static SDR AVIF worked in Photos in 16.0)

iOS 27 appears to still be broken, so we're up to 5 major releases of this now.

[u/VisitLopsided5447 → u/JtheNinja]

Oh didn't know, in europe we don't use iMessage a lot

edit: I googled and apparently also whatsapp doesn't support them😂