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Comment by kcoppock | Hacker News Reader

Do you have any plans to support Ultra HDR images, on the Android app and/or other platforms? I did some browsing of the site and didn't see any examples (but that doesn't mean it's unsupported).

I really enjoy that aspect for sharing photography on Instagram, and the support (at the client level, at least) is fairly straightforward (see https://developer.android.com/media/grow/ultra-hdr/display).

The idea of the platform does sound great, and the application seems very polished from what I can tell so far.

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I actually had to look this up. Currently we don't but apparently we could support it if you upload via the web. Our mobile apps use Expo and the native image picker re-encodes the image.

If you're interested still despite limitations (Ultra HDR Images also won't be seen by many people) I can look into this more.

Thanks for taking a look! I haven't used Expo, but looking at the docs I wonder if using 'allowEditing: false' and 'exif: true' in the ImagePickerOptions would bypass reencoding? The gainmap is stored in the EXIF data. Instagram is similar in that the gainmap is stripped if you edit the image at all, cropping included, but if no crops or filters are done then the image retains the gainmap.

Either way if the clients are able to render the HDR images, I think uploading on web is still a usable implementation.

I just did some more research and we probably won't do the work until there's more demand. We can actually easily support it on desktop (we upload the raw bytes but always default to serving a compressed version, which I can override for HDR) but for mobile there's no drop-in solution for Expo apps and thus would have to build 4 new things (iOS and Android uploader and display components). That said, I'd like to do this because I want PIECES to have a rich visual experience and was thinking of recruiting more photographers, but probably not now. Thanks for your interest though.

That's fair enough, thanks for taking a look into it anyway!

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