As Apple Silicon Macs become more of a standard, as opposed to Intel based, would it be possible to create a plugin that supports M1/M2? I don’t know how LR plugins work/are built so would this be even possible? And to avoid installing Rosetta…
Ya! I used it with a different laptop and just purchased a new one that doesn’t have Rosetta so you get prompted with this when trying to install fresh.
True, you need Rosetta to run the installer itself… the installer is just a little script that moves the components (the plugin, the camera profiles, etc) into the right folders. You could install everything without the using the installer or installing Rosetta. I’m curious if you did that, if it would work.
I’ll have to revisit how and where Rosetta is used by Lightroom Classic in relation to plugins. You should be able to run in natively (i.e. not in Rosetta emulation) and it still run plugins just fine. But under the hood, I believe Rosetta will be used as necessary by the plugins.
Just installed Lightroom on a M1 MacBook Air running macOS Ventura build 22A5311f. I copied the necessary NLP items over with AirDrop and put them where they belong.
Testing a few negatives, I got the following message:
@nate : Looks like NLP needs some work in order to run on Apple Silicon without Rosetta. The blue items produced a “wrong CPU” message when launched.
Ok, thanks @Digitizer.
Yes, during conversion, it uses ImageMagick for the analysis. It is also using ExifTool during exports/positive-copies. I believe the current build I have for both of these will require Rosetta to run.
If I can add builds of these that are native for Apple Silicon, it is possible there would be some speed increase during certain parts of conversion for those with Apple Silicon.
But you wouldn’t see any increase in other areas of the plugin, for instance, all of the editing adjustments (which I don’t believe require Rosetta) should be the same speed.
Ya that makes sense in terms of using 3rd party packages that are still using the non-Apple Silicon builds.
Personally, I’m not looking for speed increases just ways to avoid installing Rosetta. Once you install it, it’s a pain to remove. If it’s just those two tools, I looks like they have native AS builds after doing some cursory googling.
Also happy to test a build if necessary as well! 
New to the Apple Silicon! Is there any guide for us who would rather not use the installer? Just to make sure we moved all files to the right place.