[General Questions and Answers] win32forth:
Hi Guys (and possibly gals), I am new to the forum, and like y'all I would love to have the latest firmware for my L16. I purchased mine a couple of weeks ago when they were being cleared out on Amazon, got mince for $169. Not the lowest price, but low enough has LightOS-1.3.0.3.57 on it, so it takes good pictures, but doesn't have all the latest features. I'm primarily a Mac person, though I make my living developing software for Windows. I appreciate those people that made the Luma installers available, and have downloaded them. Like others, I suspect anyone that tried to use the Luma software on any M1 etal. Mac, has found out that it won't run. I tried everything, including trying to virtualize early versions of the macOS, in an attempt to run the Luma software on my mac mini, but no such luck. Below is my solution for using the L16 with a Mac.

Buy a Windows11 mini pc (I bought a Beelink i5-8279U on special from Amazon for $319).

Connect the Beelink to a KVM so you can easily switch between Windows and the Mac.

Load the Luma software on Windows on the Beelink.

Share your Mac Pictures folder so that you can connect to it on your Windows machine.

On the Windows machine, when you connect the L16 to the Beelink, then Windows offers to automatically import the jpg files. DO NOT allow Windows to do that. Instead click the button that offers to mount the drive and open an explorer window. This allows you to manually select the ".lri" files and drag them to a folder of your choice in the pictures folder.

As a side note, it is incredibly important to configure Windows11 so that it DOES NOT automatically upload all your L16 files to the OneDrive. If you don't do this then you will be paying Microsoft lots of money for all the L16 files that will fill up your OneDrive cloud storage. Mine filled up 5GB in a day of shooting, so don't forget to turn OneDrive off.

I pull the "lri" files from the camera folder into the local folder in your Pictures folder. I name my folders inside Pictures with the Date so that when I ultimately edit them in Lightroom, then everything is grouped by date.

You can also pull in the jpg files from the camera if you like, but you need to either;

process the images manually before connecting the camera to the Beelink,

or you need to configure your L16 to automatically process the images (JPGs) when you are charging the camera, which also means when you have the camera connected to the computer. See warning below.

If you chose automatic image processing like I did, then you need to be sure to wait for the images to process and create full 13MP jpg files before trying to copy them into the computer. You can tell if the images are processed or not because if they are not processed then the jpg file size will be under a MB, and if they are processed then the jpg files will be over 4MB.

Warning: The jpg files on the camera that are under 1 MB cannot be reliably copied because they are really just links to the tiny jpg files present inside the ".lri" rawfiles. You don't want those jpg files anyway, ignore them.

I normally wait for the jpg files to be processed after connecting the L16 to the Beelink by looking at the camera folder and clicking away to another folder and back again until all the jpg files are visible as processed images over 4MB.

If you REALLY want to try and used the L16 as a point and shoot and then just sue the jpg files it creates directly, then you are welcome to try, but personally I think it is a waste of a good camera.

Once you have the lri files loaded on your Windows11 machine, disconnect the L16. If you don't, then Luma may want to import your shots itself, and I have found the Luma import is unreliable. I believe this is probably because I didn't wait long enough for the images to be processed after I connected the camera and before trying to import the images into the computer using Luma.

Now you can open Luma and just start editing the images yourself.

Click the top left light gear button and select the folder where you imported the images.

In my case, I usually just want to convert the images into ".dng" files so I can open them in Lightroom. So, I select all the images and click the up arrow image (Export) in the lower right corner and I export to dng. to do that follow this;

Clicking Export opens a dialog. By default Lumen exports files to the folder "Pictures\Light\Export\<year-month-day>" folder, but taht is not where i want to put them, so I click on the path in the dialog and Lumen allows me to specify where I want to save the exported images to.

I export them to a sub-folder called dng that I create under the date folder I created for the original lri images. This keeps them all nicely together for later copying and backup

I also click the "full" image size button and the dng format button before clicking the export button to start the export.

The result should be a bunch of dng files in your dng sub folder below your dated folder.

If you want to actually edit the images, using Luma, then you can do that too at this point. The L16 does have some pretty cool post processing f-stop (depth of field) adjustment capability, and I have certainly used that on several occasions. You can also crop the gigantic images the L16 creates to get better framing if you like, and then export the image to a new dng file. Be sure to edit the name of the dng when you export it, or it will overwrite the previously exported dng on disk.

If you have completed step 8 above, you are ready to copy your files over to the Mac for further enhancement in Lightroom.

I use a free utility called FreeFileSync (https://freefilesync.org/) that is available for Windows and macOS, that makes it pretty easy to copy and or backup files from one drive to another, either on the same computer or on a network drive. In my case, i create a local backup copy of my images on a 2TB drive that is connected directly to the Beelink, and I also copy the same files to the Mac shared folder where Lightroom will be able to get to them. FreeFileSync allows you to make multiple sets of locations that can be syncronized. I use the "Update" option to update to teh destination, but never delete anything from the destination during the sync.

Ok, now that your images are copied to the Mac, you can switch the KVM to the Mac and open Lightroom.

Once in Lightroom, you can import using the add folder button and then navigate to the newly created folder in the Pictures folder on your Mac. If you also imported the jpg files from the L16, then you will want to exclude those from the Lightroom import so you won't get confused while editing and accidently work on a jpg instead of the full size dng file.

In addition to the above, I also keep large multi-terabyte drives connected to my Mac for image backup, which is done automatically every night.

Well, that is about it for me. I know I could just use Windows and have a simpler life, but as I said, I prefer macintosh.

This was all written pretty stream of consciousness, so if you have any questions i wil try to answer.

Enjoy

Tom