Feature request: png to heif/heic with alpha or depth information

When you do a lot of compositing and image manipulation, alpha channels and depth info are your friends. It’d be great to be able to batch-convert PNGs (with alpha) or TIFFs (with alpha or depth channels) to HEIF/HEIC files, which would be smaller, yet high-quality, and bring their alpha/depth magic along for the ride.

Retrobatch does this! In order to view the transparency, you’ll need to be running 10.14 or later however. Previous versions of MacOS didn’t support the alpha channel.

Are you trying it and it’s not working for you?

Or are you asking for the alpha channel to be converted into a depth map for the HEIC, much like what the iOS camera adds?

I am (for a lot of reasons related to Quicktime) hanging on to MacOS 10.13.6. I don’t have a problem working with HEIC/HEIF files with depth information (and Serif Affinity Photo loads them up and does the right thing by scaling the depth layer to match the RGB.) But I couldn’t come up with a way to synthetically create an RGBA file to HEIC/HEIF-ize. TV people have a LOT of files with associated alphas…these days many are PNG or TIF. Thanks for the info, however…I may have to fight with FFMPEG some.