Timelapse Creator — Lightroom Classic plug-in

Creates a timelapse video (H.264, H.265, or ProRes 422) from the photos selected in Adobe Lightroom Classic, using ffmpeg as the encoder. The develop settings of every photo are applied, so what you graded in Lightroom is what ends up in the video.

Status: 0.4.0 — work in progress. SDR pipeline complete; HDR output is under investigation (see HDR below).

📖 Usage guide with screenshots: English · Italiano

Features

• 720p / 1080p / 4K output, landscape or portrait
• H.264 (libx264), H.265 (libx265, hvc1-tagged for Apple players), and ProRes 422 (Proxy/LT/standard/HQ, .mov) for professional editing pipelines
• Optional hardware-accelerated encoding (Apple VideoToolbox), auto-detected — dramatically faster, especially for H.265 (5x or more on Apple Silicon); quality is controlled by target bitrate instead of CRF in this mode
• Frame rate selection (24/25/30/60 fps, or a custom rate) — 1 photo = 1 frame
• Fill (center crop) or fit (black bars) aspect handling
• Quality presets plus advanced controls: CRF, encoder preset, min/max keyframe interval (GOP), max/target bitrate
• Optional ffmpeg deflicker filter
• Instant frame-by-frame preview (slider + prev/next) showing each photo as developed, plus a fast low-resolution MP4 preview (480p/240p) opened in the system video player
• Save the video next to the source photos, or in a folder you choose
• Cancelable export: both the frame render and the ffmpeg encode can be interrupted mid-run
• UI in English and Italian

Requirements

• Adobe Lightroom Classic 13+ (developed against LrC 15)
• ffmpeg ≥ 4.0 on the same machine (developed and tested with 8.0.1; older versions may lack the deflicker filter, added in ffmpeg 3.4) — macOS: brew install ffmpeg. The plug-in auto-detects Homebrew/PATH installs; a custom path can be set in File → Plug-in Manager → Timelapse Creator.
• macOS today; the code is structured for a future Windows port.

Installation

1. Clone or download this repository.
2. Lightroom Classic → File → Plug-in Manager… → Add and select the TimelapseCreator.lrdevplugin folder.
3. In the Plug-in Manager, check that ffmpeg was detected (or set its path manually) under the Timelapse Creator section.
4. Select the photos of your sequence, then run File → Plug-in Extras → Create Timelapse…

Usage notes

• Photos are sorted by capture time; videos in the selection are skipped.
• Frames are rendered to a temporary folder via the Lightroom export engine (full develop settings, correct size for the chosen crop), encoded, then the temporary files are removed. Budget disk space for one JPEG per photo.
• The frame-by-frame preview shows each photo as developed (including its own crop, if any) — it does not simulate the video's target crop/fit.

HDR

The goal is H.265 10-bit HDR output (PQ or HLG) when all selected photos are HDR edits. The Lightroom SDK does not document any HDR export setting, so the plug-in ships two diagnostic tools to probe what your Lightroom version actually supports:

• File → Plug-in Extras → Timelapse Diagnostics… — probes export formats (AVIF/JXL/TIFF-16), speculative HDR keys, thumbnail latency and ffmpeg.
• The "Timelapse: dump export settings" post-process action in the Export dialog — export one photo with HDR output enabled and one without, then diff the two dumps to reveal the real HDR keys.

The ffmpeg side (10-bit, PQ/HLG tagging, hdr10=1) is already implemented and unit-tested.

Development

# unit tests for the command builder (pure Lua, no Lightroom needed)
lua tests/test_ffmpeg_command.lua

# integration test: real encodes with synthetic frames (needs ffmpeg)
sh tests/integration_ffmpeg.sh

# check that Info.lua and Version.lua declare the same version
# (they can't share code — Info.lua runs where `require` isn't available)
lua scripts/check_version.lua

Releasing

1. Bump the version by hand in both TimelapseCreator.lrdevplugin/Info.lua (VERSION.display) and TimelapseCreator.lrdevplugin/Version.lua (display) — lua scripts/check_version.lua confirms they match.
2. Commit, then tag: git tag -a vX.Y.Z -m "...".
3. Run sh scripts/release.sh vX.Y.Z. It verifies the tag matches the code version, checks syntax (system Lua and, for release builds, Lightroom's actual Lua 5.1), runs unit tests, compiles every plugin script to Lua 5.1 bytecode (except Info.lua, kept as source — see the comment in that file) with the compiler bundled in the Lightroom Classic SDK, packages TimelapseCreator.lrplugin together with README.md and LICENSE into a zip under dist/, then — after you confirm — pushes the tag and publishes a GitHub release with the zip attached (gh CLI required). Requires the Lightroom Classic SDK locally (not part of this repo — see ADOBE_LUAC in scripts/release.sh if it's not at the default path).

The integration test also exercises hardware encoding and ProRes when run on a machine with VideoToolbox (skipped otherwise).

See PLAN.md for the full design and roadmap.

License

GPL-3.0 — see LICENSE.