# convert raw to jpg



## DMartin (Aug 19, 2019)

I'm 'optimising' some large folders of photos dating back a few years.   I've quite a few RAW+JPG files which - ideally - I'd like to convert to just JPG.   Is there a way of doing that while maintaining the edit history?   I suspect the answer is "no", and  to manually export JPGs, delete the RAW+JPG files, and replace those with the exported JPGs.  Do I have any other option?


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## Paul_DS256 (Aug 19, 2019)

DMartin, if you don't have RAW then the edit history is irrelevant as far as I know. You couldn't use the history with the exported JPG. Am I missing something?


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## DMartin (Aug 19, 2019)

These are RAW files I'm talking about.  They have JPG sidecars.  I just want to end up with pure JPG, and the most automated solution is probably going to be what I'll go with.


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## Hal P Anderson (Aug 19, 2019)

Rather than delete your raw files, you could convert them to lossy-compressed DNGs, which are almost as small as the JPEGs and yet retain much of their "rawness". Then you could delete the JPEG sidecars. That will allow you to easily keep all your edits.


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## DMartin (Aug 19, 2019)

Hal what you say sounds nearly ideal and I'd do it if I had an idea how to go about that even for one photo never mind a few 100.


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## Hal P Anderson (Aug 19, 2019)

In the Library module, select all the photos of interest. You may need to filter on some criteria. Then in the Library menu, choose "Convert Photos to DNG...". You'll get a dialogue box:




Note that you can choose to delete the originals by ticking the appropriate box.. 

To delete the JPEG sidecars, I would simply delete them in Windows Explorer. LR will continue to say that they are present, but that isn't really a problem.


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