Back in April I posted a discussion of the rationale for converting proprietary RAW files to DNG. Now, it appears I'm going to have to do just that.
It's not space that's the issue but the wonky relationship between Bridge CS4 and some of the RAW file formats, particularly Nikon's NEF. For some weeks now I've been unable to update the metadata in NEF files; I would continually get an error message when I attempted to update a group of files -- and, if this has ever happened to you you know what a serious hassle this is. On several occasions, when I tried to update a large group of files I would have to force quit Bridge since it wanted to show an error message for each file and each message had to be closed out manually. Not a pretty picture when you're trying to update 608 files. And this seemed to happen with each and every NEF file I was working on.
But this problem does NOT occur when working with DNG RAW files.
So, in addition to reducing overall file size (and consequently space concerns), I now have cleaner files. Or will have.
Since there are more than 8k RAW files in our central library I'll be at this for a while, to be sure. But I suspect it will be time well spent in not only making accessibility and searchability that more effective but also paving the way for archiving these image files for years to come.
