Roadmap

Being built and tested.

• Public beta

  The first builds go out to testers on iPhone, iPad and Mac. Leave your email on the home page and you will hear when it opens.

  Release

• Video clips

  Import clips with your photos and play them in the loupe. Trim them, pick the poster frame, preview your edits and export at full size, 1080p or 720p.

  Editing Library

• iCloud sync

  No server of your own? iCloud carries your presets, settings and edits between your iPhone, iPad and Mac, and can keep your photos in iCloud Drive. What on-device search found travels too, so your phone finds the faces and words your Mac found.

  Sync Apple devices

• Shortcuts, Siri, Spotlight and Handoff

  Find, rate, flag and export photos from Shortcuts and Siri. Find them in Spotlight by caption, keyword, person or place, and pick up the photo you were on from another device.

  Apple devices

• Edit from the Photos app, with Live Photos

  Open a photo in Apple's Photos app and edit it with the LightBites sliders and presets, without importing it. Live Photos keep their motion when you edit and save them.

  Apple devices Editing

• More than one library, on a drive or a NAS

  Keep several libraries and switch between them without restarting: one on the device, one that syncs with your server, or one on an external drive or a shared folder on your network.

  Library

• Colour that matches your camera

  Measured colour profiles for the most popular cameras, so a raw file opens looking the way it did on the camera's screen, before you touch a slider. Cameras with no measured profile start from the typical colour of their maker.

  Raw & colour

• Olympus and OM System: previews, ORI files and more models checked

  Olympus and OM System photos open from the preview the camera saved in the file. We are making that part solid: ORI files, the largest preview in each file, the camera's details, and more models checked against real photos.

  Raw & colour

• Fujifilm X-Trans III: white balance in Kelvin

  The X-T20, X-T2, X-Pro2, X-E3, X-H1 and X100F show the white balance as a temperature and tint, worked out from the numbers the camera saved in the file.

  Raw & colour

• Blackmagic CinemaDNG files

  Lossy CinemaDNG frames from Blackmagic Pocket and Micro Cinema cameras, stored as 12-bit JPEG tiles, open as full raw files instead of failing to import.

  Raw & colour

Up next, roughly in this order.

• On the App Store

  LightBites on the App Store for iPhone, iPad and Mac. Free to download, with a 7-day trial of LightBites Pro and one purchase for all three. No subscription.

  Release

• Older Nikon Coolpix raw files

  Coolpix E5400, E5700, E8400 and E8800 files store the picture as two interlaced halves. They will open as full raw files with the right picture and colour.

  Raw & colour

• Older Fujifilm FinePix raw files

  Raw files from FinePix cameras made before the X series, including the SuperCCD sensors, will open as full raw files. The first SuperCCD SR bodies stay as previews.

  Raw & colour

• Canon CRW raw files

  Canon's raw format from 2000 to 2004 (EOS D30 to 300D, PowerShot G1 to G6) will open as full raw files, not only as previews. Some bodies stay as previews for now.

  Raw & colour

• GoPro GPR raw files

  GoPro's GPR photos, a DNG with GoPro's own compression, will open as full raw files.

  Raw & colour

• Focus points

  See where the camera focused, drawn over the photo, and zoom straight to that spot to check sharpness while you cull.

  Library

• Mask presets

  Save a mask's adjustments, like a brighter face or a deeper sky, and use them again in one tap. Export them to share with a friend.

  Editing

• Slideshow export and Print

  Give a slideshow titles and overlays and export it as a video or a PDF, and print photos straight from your iPad or Mac.

  Library Apple devices

• Nikon High Efficiency raw files

  Full raw decoding for NEF files saved in Nikon's High Efficiency modes (Z8, Z9, Z6 III and others), which open as previews for now. A decoder is being added.

  Raw & colour

On the list, further out.

• Olympus and OM System: develop compressed raw files

  Every Olympus and OM System body since about 2008 saves compressed ORF files, and they open as their preview for now. Developing them as full raw files needs a decoder written without copying existing open-source ones, which our rules do not allow. We are waiting for one that meets that rule, and sample files from your camera help.

  Raw & colour

• Subject, Sky and People masks

  Select the subject, the sky or a person in one tap, worked out on your device by a model you download once.

  Editing

• Corrections for more lenses

  Distortion, vignetting and colour fringing corrected automatically for more lenses, from profiles we measure ourselves.

  Raw & colour

• Comments and likes on shared albums

  People you share an album with can like photos and leave a comment, and you see it in the app.

  Sync

• More languages

  Korean, Hindi, Arabic, Vietnamese and Indonesian, with right-to-left layouts for Arabic.