I recently had to move from Aperture to Photos for organising and editing my RAW format photos as Aperture no longer lets me order print products. I use quite a few plugins for the editing bit, which in Aperture could be done with the lossless TIFF file format. However, when using a plugin in Photos I see the image file has been converted to JPG. Is there a way to change this to also use TIFF or PNG?

I'm unable to see any quality loss with my own eyes, but I prefer to keep my photos as high quality as possible for print etc.


Short answer : If the plugin has no option to select "TIFF", you'll have to live with JPEG

Long answer: When you look at the example source code that apple provides for Photos plugins (Photos sample code for plugins), you can see that the file types for the output are explicitly set to kUTTypeJPEG by

            guard let destination = CGImageDestinationCreateWithURL(output.renderedContentURL as CFURL, kUTTypeJPEG, 1, nil)

This means that the plugin decides the format it writes to. If the format is hardcoded and the plugin does not give you the choice to change the output format to TIFF, you will have to live with its choice. If it allows you to write to kUTTypeTIFF, you get what you want.

Hope this helps you.

  • stackoverflow.com/questions/39259094/… shows how to change the compression to minimum when using jpeg – user2707001 Sep 3 '17 at 8:43
  • Ah, interesting. I'm using Affinity Photo and Luminar, and when using Luminar from Aperture I could set the format in Aperture, not in Luminar itself. Do you (or anyone) know of any plugins that do use another format than JPEG? – Lizzan Sep 3 '17 at 9:04

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