Convert to DNG on ingest?

[rcohn]

I see this was requested a while ago. Any further developments, or reasons why it's not practical or advisable? The biggest benefit I can see is DNG's support for embedding metadata instead of needing side car files.

Ric

[Kirk Baker]

Ric,

I see this was requested a while ago. Any further developments, or reasons why it's not practical or advisable? The biggest benefit I can see is DNG's support for embedding metadata instead of needing side car files.

Metadata (IPTC and XMP) can be safely embedded into most RAW formats (those that are TIFF-based).  Photo Mechanic has been capable of adding captions to RAW files since the 4.4 version.

We may still offer an option to convert to DNG on Ingest but it will require that the DNG converter be available separately from Photo Mechanic.

-Kirk

[mbrakes]

When PM gets cataloguing capabilities I really hope DNG conversion becomes a part of the toolkit. I usually don't bother to convert to DNG on import as it slows down the process, but I would really like to convert my older RAW files to DNG as part of an archival workflow. In an ideal world I think as much as possible of any archival workflow should be handled within the cataloguing application, including DNG conversion. If the actual "DNG engine" needs to be installed separately because of licensing issues that's fine with me, but I really hope the actual process can be called from within PM as I like to keep switching between applications to a minimum to keep the workflow as efficient as possible.