Question about RAW/JPG Pollution in Lightroom

[cometboy]

I have been using Lightroom for about a year and am far from a power user. I am hoping someone can help me with this fairly minor problem that I would still like to solve.

I transitioned from Photoshop Elements on a PC to Lightroom on a MAC.

When I was on Elements, I used to keep all of my RAW files in one folder and put my JPGs in another. For reasons that I just do not remember, this used to work for me.

Now in Lightroom, I have about 4''' pairs of RAW files and JPG files that appear in Lightroom as two separate sets of files. Since they were imported from two locations, Lightroom treats them as two separate images, which leads to a lot of visual pollution. Scrolling through the affected areas is like a long stutter of images.

Is there any way to merge these paired RAW/JPG files to half the amount of (visual) space they take up on the Lightroom catalog screen? Stacking does not appear to work, as Lightroom seems to want the images to come from the same folder.

Hopefully someone out ther can understand what I'm asking and either tell me to abandon all hope, give me a solution or ...

I've thought about just deleting all the JPGs and just keeping the RAW files, but this makes me uneasy.

Thanks for any inputs.

 

[Brad Snyder]

cometboy, Welcome to the Forums.

Several things you need to know are combined here, with this problem.

First, Lr offers two ways of dealing with raw/JPG pairs at import time. When dealing with similarly named pairs, Lr can be configured to import both of the files individually, or you can treat them as a 'conjoined' pair. In the first mode, you'll see both 123.CR2 and 123.JPG as discrete files in Lr. In the second, you'll see something like 123.CR2+JPG as the file name. In this instance, it seems as if you've ended up in the first configuration.

Some ideas;
1) If you have no need for further operations with them, you can safely 'remove' the JPG files from Lr. Removing deletes the photos from Lr's catalog, while leaving the image files safely alone on the hard-drive.

2) Since the different file types are in separate folders, it's easy enough to choose to view only folders with raw files in them, and ignore the JPG containing folders.

Tell us a little more about how you imported the images into Lr, and about your workflow, i.e., how you import, process, and subsequently export and use the images.
That'll help us tell you how to proceed most productively.

 

[cometboy]

Thanks for the information.

My normal workflow is very conventional. Imports go from SD card to main and backup drive.

I shoot RAW/JPG and all imports go well. I end up with nicely paired RAW/JPG images and all is well.

This issue just concerned a "legacy" issue left over from my chaotic (and traumatic) migration from PC/Elements to Mac/Lightroom about a year ago.

I will ponder your suggestions and see which seems best for me.

I'm a better photographer than computer guy, so the help is greatly welcome.

 

[dj_paige]

You could stack the RAW and JPG photos, and then you only see one of the pair. Ctrl-G creates a stack after you have selected two or more photos.

 

[PatrickC]

How about moving the jpegs into the same folder(s) as the corresponding raw files? You can then import them as raw+jpeg, which shows up as a single 'image' in LR.

You've probably done some work on many of the raws in LR, so you won't want to delete them if you can avoid it; I can't remember for sure, but I think it is possible to 'merge' the two without reimporting; possibly using 'synchronise folder' once you've moved the jpegs? You might need to do a bit of searching here and maybe Google.

If I'm wrong, you can still write your LR editing to xmp sidecar files before removing the images from LR. When you reimport the raws + jpegs LR will read your adjustments from the xmps.

Patrick Cunningham

 

[cometboy]

Thanks for the suggestions.

I'll look into them and decide which one works best for me.