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Generally, I take and store all of my images in RAW in Lightroom. If I capture a beautiful moment, I want to be able to access all of that beauty at any time in the future.

But there are exceptions. This afternoon, I went to check out a cottage that I'm considering renting, and I took forty images to remember it by—all in RAW. I will never need these in RAW, so I would like to resize them in place to reduce their storage footprint.

I've already organized and tagged them, so I don't want to export resized versions, re-import those exports, and delete the originals (as I'm sure some will recommend). That's a lot of steps and even after that, I would have to reapply organizational data.

How can I resize them in place?

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  • You cannot resize a RAW image, you'll have to export it anyway. – Zenit Jan 25 '17 at 15:21
  • Why throw away data irreversibly given the incredibly low cost of storage nowadays? Will a few tens of megabytes really make a difference? – Jim Garrison Jan 25 '17 at 15:54
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Another option is to convert to lossy DNG (Library -> Convert Photo to DNG) - you'll have the original resolution image, but with a good space saving relative to a raw file (and there is an option to delete the original after conversion).

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  • I thought DNG was supposed to be lossless. News to me. dpreview.com/articles/0520987423/… In contrast with @MikeD's answer, would this one preserve metadata, flags, collections, and adjustments that I've already added to the photo in the catalog? – Merchako Feb 17 '17 at 11:12
  • Metadata, adjustments, flags, etc. should be preserved (they normally propagate to derived copies (TIF/PSD) and virtual copies). I'm honestly not sure about collections - you'd need to try it (it would be very clever if it did). – Barrie Spence Feb 18 '17 at 21:07
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Select the RAW photos, then do an Export.

In the Export Location section, choose Export To: Same folder as original photo.

Check the Add to This Catalog Checkbox.

Select the file output options you want for the new images.

Export the images. At this point the JPG's will be imported into the same folder, and your RAW files should still be selected, simply delete them.

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  • 1
    Does this preserve flags, collections, etc.? – ths Jan 25 '17 at 18:21
  • This method preserved keywords, ratings, and other metadata. It rendered adjustments and didn't preserve flags or collection memberships. Nonetheless, it's able to lower file sizes significantly more than the conversion to DNG, so I find it useful for photos that I want to keep but don't expect to fiddle with. – Merchako May 26 '17 at 21:06
  • Convert to DNG preserves everything, including collections and publish services (I've been using it to flatten/ replace TIFs). Lossy DNG should give bigger file savings. – Barrie Spence Jul 21 '17 at 14:53
  • This was a great step for me, then I still wanted to export to a given size and found lightroompresets.com/blogs/pretty-presets-blog/… which shows the Image Sizing option which is what I wanted. It allows me to limit images to 800x600 which is great for images that need to be saved, but not great quality. – PatS Dec 7 '19 at 4:58

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