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Lightroom to Sony Bravia

Show photos exported by Lightroom on a Sony Bravia TV

... on Mac OS X

The problem

My new Sony Bravia TV can show photo slideshows using photos on a USB device. It supports the DCF 2.0 standard, which only includes JPEG files with Chroma Subsampling settings 4:2:2 and 4:2:0.

I use Adobe Lightroom 2 on Mac OS X for RAW conversion and managing my photo collection. Lightroom exports high quality JPEG files with Chroma Subsampling settings 4:4:4.

The solution

Convert the JPEG files that lightroom produces to a format that the Sony Bravia supports with mogrify (part of the ImageMagick toolkit).

The procedure

First we need to install ImageMagick. There are several ways to do that (visit the website for details). I used Homebrew.

Installing ImageMagick through Homebrew takes 3 steps:

  1. Install XCode with X11 (through the App Store or from your Mac OS X install DVD)
  2. Install Homebrew by executing the following command in a Terminal.app window: /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/gist/323731)"
  3. Install ImageMagick by executing the following command in a Terminal.app window: brew install imagemagick

Then I wrote a script (LR2Sony.sh) with the following contents:

#!/bin/bash
/usr/local/bin/mogrify -sampling-factor 2x1 $*

We need to make sure it is executable:

chmod +x LR2Sony.sh

The trick is to use the -sampling-factor 2x1 argument of mogrify. You could try to use the LR/Mogrify plugin and let it pass that option to mogrify (I didn't test this).

We can now convert photos from lightroom by executing:

./LR2Sony.sh *.jpg

We can even do better. If we put the script in $HOME/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Export Actions, we can chose it as an export action when exporting photos from lightroom. Lightroom will then call the script automatically after exporting.

Enjoy watching your photos on your Sony Bravia TV!