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I use Lightroom for all of my photo ‘development’ and library management needs. Generally speaking, it is great software. Despite being horribly nonstandard (that is, using nonnative widgets), it is the only example of good UI/UX that I’ve seen out of Adobe in… at least a decade. I’ll be perfectly honest right now: I hate Adobe with a passion otherwise entirely unknown to me. About 85-90% of my professional life is spent in Acrobat Pro, which gets substantially worse every major release. I would guess that around 40% of my be-creative-just-to-keep-my-head-screwed-on time is spent in various pieces of CC (which, subscription model is just one more fuck-you, Adobe). But Lightroom has always been special. I beta tested the first release, and even then I knew… this was the rare excuse for violating so many native UI conventions. This made sense.

Okay, from that rant we come up with: thumbs-down to Adobe, but thumbs-up to Lightroom. But there’s one thing that Lightroom has never opted to solve, despite so many cries, and that is PNG export. Especially with so many photographers (myself included) using flickr, which reencodes TIFFs to JPEGs, but leaves the equally lossless PNG files alone, it is ridiculous that the Lightroom team refuses to incorporate a PNG export plugin. Just one more ’RE: stop making garbage’ memo that I need to forward to the clowns at Adobe.

All of this to just come to my one-liner solution for Mac users… sips is the CLI/Darwin equivalent of the image conversion software that MacOS uses for conversion in Preview, etc. The manpage is available online, conveniently. But my use is very simple – make a bunch of supid TIFFs into PNGs.

for i in ./*.tif ; sips -s format png "$i" --out "${i/tif/png}" && rm "$i"

…is the basic line that I use on a directory full of TIFFs output from Lightroom. Note that this is zsh, and I’m not 100% positive that the variable substitution is valid bash. Lightroom seemingly outputs some gross TIFFs, and sips throws up an error for every file, but still exits 0, and spits out a valid PNG. sips does not do parallelism, so a better way to handle this may be (using semaphore):

for i in ./*.tif; sem -j +5 sips -s format png "$i" --out "${i/tif/png}"

…and then cleaning up the TIFFs afterward (rm ./*.tif). Either way. There’s probably a way to do both using flocks or some such, but I haven’t put much time into that race condition.

At the end of the day, there are plenty of image conversion packages out there (ImageMagick comes to mind), but if you’re on MacOS/Darwin… why not use the builtins if they function? And sips does, in a clean and simple way. While it certainly isn’t a portable solution, it’s worth knowing about for anyone who does image work on a Mac and feels comfortable in the CLI.