2026 is nearly upon us, and Google, Microsoft, and Apple remain steadfast in the refusal to ever allow anyone to share wide-gamut or HDR images.

Every year, I go on a rant about how my camera can take HDR images natively, but the only way to share these with a wider audience is to convert them to a slideshow and make a Rec.2020 HDR movie that I upload to YouTube.

It's absolutely bonkers to me that we've all collectively figured out how to stream a Hollywood movie to a pocket device over radio with a quality exceeding that of a typical cinema theatre, but these multi-trillion market cap corporations have all utterly failed to allow users to reliably send a still image with the same quality to each other!

Any year now, maybe in 2030s, someone will get around to a ticket that is currently at position 11,372 down the list below thousands of internal bullshit that nobody needed done, rearranging a dashboard nobody has ever opened, or whatever, and get around to letting computers be used for images. You know, utilising the screen, the only part billions of users ever look at, with their human eyes.

I can't politely express my disgust at the ineptitude, the sloth, the foot dragging, the uncaring unprofessionalism of people that get paid more annually then I get in a decade who are all too distracted making Clippy 2.0 instead of getting right the most utterly fundamental aspect of consumer computing.

If I could wave a magic wand, I would force a dev team from each of these companies to remain locked in a room until this was sorted out.

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mirsadm an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It is incredibly annoying that instead of adopting JpegXL they decided to use UltraHDR. A giant hack which works very poorly.

	▲	jiggawatts an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> A giant hack which works very poorly. Indeed. I tried every possible export format from Adobe Lightroom including JPG + HDR gainmaps, and it looks... potato. With a narrow gamut like sRGB it looks only slightly better than JPG, but with a wider gamut you get terrible posterization. People's faces turn grey and green and blue skies get bands across them. Meanwhile my iPhone creates flawless 10-bit Dolby Vision video with the press of a button that I can share with anyone without it turning into a garbled mess. Just last week I checked up on the "state of the art" for HDR still image sharing with Gemini Deep Research and after ten minutes of trawling through obscure forum posts it came back with a blunt "No". We've figured out how to make machines think, but not how to exchange pictures in the quality that my 12-year-old DSLR is capable of capturing! ... unless I make a YouTube video with the images. That -- and only that -- works!

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geocar an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> the only way to share these with a wider audience is to convert them to a slideshow and make a Rec.2020 HDR movie that I upload to YouTube

i understand some of this frustration, but really you just have to use ffmpeg to convert it to a web format (which can be done by ffmpeg.js running in a service worker if your cpu is expensive) and spell <img as <video muted autoplay playsinline which is only a little annoying

> I can't politely express my disgust at the ineptitude, the sloth, the foot dragging, the uncaring unprofessionalism of people that get paid more annually then I get in a decade who are all too distracted making Clippy 2.0 instead of getting right the most utterly fundamental aspect of consumer computing.

hear hear

> If I could wave a magic wand, I would force a dev team from each of these companies to remain locked in a room until this was sorted out.

i can think of a few better uses for such a wand...

	▲	jiggawatts an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> <img as <video muted autoplay playsinline which is only a little annoying Doesn't work for sharing images in text messages, social media posts, email, Teams, Wikipedia, etc... > i can think of a few better uses for such a wand... We all have our priorities.