For years I've carried a phone and a tablet with more processing power than the computers I learned photo editing on. Apple's A-series Pro chips in iPhone and the MacBook Neo, and the M-series chips in iPad and Mac, are genuinely desktop-class silicon.
And yet Adobe has never let me use that power for one of the most basic things I do as a photographer: merging bracketed exposures into an HDR. Lightroom on the desktop has done it for ages. Lightroom on iPhone and iPad still won't. On mobile, the answer has always been the same: wait until you get home.
For drone and landscape work, home is the worst place to find out something went wrong. A ghosted tree line, a bracket that drifted in the wind, highlights clipped in every frame. By the time you're at a desk, the light is gone.
I love Lightroom Classic. I just don't love being tied to my desk.
Let me be clear up front: I'm not trying to leave Lightroom. Lightroom Classic is still the center of my photo workflow, and it's still a solid application (as is Lightroom cloud, for those who still use it). My problem was never the editor. It was that the one step I most want to do in the field only happens at my desk.
The push to fix that came from an unexpected place. I'd been bumping up against my Creative Cloud storage limit, and rather than keep paying for more space, I was already looking at alternatives for where my photos live. I ended up building my own private cloud: ownCloud Infinite Scale on Proxmox, on a server I colocate, with a local RAID array as my working copy, all feeding Lightroom Classic.
Once my originals weren't living in Adobe's cloud, I needed a mobile HDR tool that didn't assume where they were. Nothing I found fit.
So I handed Claude Code a challenge
I asked Claude Code to build me an app that would let me merge bracketed HDRs on the go, on my iPhone or iPad, using the hardware I already carry. About three days of development later, I had something I considered shippable. That app is BracketMerge, and it's now on the App Store.
Here's what it does today:
- Merges RAW/DNG, JPEG, HEIC, TIFF and PNG brackets, reading exposures from EXIF and refining them from the pixels
- Aligns handheld and drone brackets automatically, with auto-crop
- Reduces ghosting, plus a deghost brush: paint over anything that moved and choose which exposure fills it
- Starts from your camera's own color profile, then lets you pick a look (Linear, Adobe-style, AgX-style, ACES-style or Khronos Neutral-style)
- Exports a Lightroom-ready floating-point DNG, with your crop and edits coming through as normal, editable sliders, or Adaptive HDR HEIC/JPEG, HDR10 HEIC, OpenEXR or 32-bit TIFF
That DNG export is the whole point. BracketMerge isn't meant to replace Lightroom. It's meant to do the merge in the field and hand a clean file back to it.
I also kept a review step in the flow on purpose. I want to see the merge before I start color correcting, not have it happen headlessly in the background and hope for the best.
I even researched a "Sign in with Adobe" round trip: browse your Lightroom cloud library, pull the brackets, merge them, push the HDR back. Pushing back is supported. Pulling down the original RAW files, as of Adobe's last public word on it, is not. The API hands back processed JPEG previews, which aren't real input for a proper HDR merge. That settled it: BracketMerge would work with files wherever they live.
A quick word on AI-assisted development
BracketMerge exists because AI coding tools have gotten good enough that one person with a clear problem can ship a real app in days. That's changing software quickly, and not always quietly.
This month, a developer released ArtCraft, a free, open-source suite of seven apps modeled on Adobe's lineup, including Photoshop and Lightroom, built with Claude and described as clean-room reimplementations from public file-format specs. Around the same time, a GitHub project called Reverse Engineer Anything (REA) went viral for automating much of the work of cloning existing apps. Together they've turned "AI can clone your software" into a mainstream conversation, along with real questions about intellectual property and what a "clone" even is.
I find it fascinating, and the timing alongside BracketMerge is hard to miss. But I don't plan to use ArtCraft. Lightroom Classic does what I need, and a suite that's still in early development isn't something I'd trust with years of work. I'd rather build the one piece Adobe left out and plug it into the tools I already rely on.
Cloud-native, provider-agnostic
Right now, BracketMerge works through Apple Photos and the native Files app, which already reaches an SD card, a USB drive, a NAS, iCloud Drive and any cloud provider with a Files extension.
Next, I'm building direct integrations so BracketMerge can connect straight to where your brackets live:
- Dropbox
- ownCloud Infinite Scale
- Synology
- Nextcloud
- WebDAV and SMB shares
It's the same idea the app started with, taken further: HDR merging that's cloud-native, but not tied to any one provider. Your photos, your storage, your editor.
Why this matters to me
I've followed a simple rule my whole career in IT: if I do something three times, I automate it. BracketMerge is that rule applied to my own photography. I got tired of waiting until I was home, so I built the thing that meant I didn't have to.
BracketMerge is free to download, with unlimited merging and editing and a few full-quality exports every week. BracketMerge Pro unlocks unlimited exports.
Get BracketMerge on the App Store · See all screenshots on the store page