lightroom 3: export unchanged jpgs without recompressing

[Neutronensturm]

Hi,

I shoot RAW+JPG to be able to use properly looking JPGs right away and to further edit problematic images in RAW. With the good images I just delete the RAWs as I don't edit them anyway (and my emergency P&S cam just produces JPGs anyway).
Now I would like to export several images to a different folder having the RAWs converted and the unchanged JPGs just copied. Is this possible? Recompressing the unchanged JPGs just reduces quality unnecessarily.

thx in advance for your answers,

Fabian

 

[Cliff3]

If you really mean it when you say unchanged, then specify original for the format option in the file settings section of the export dialog. Lightroom will disable the other options that allow you to resize or adjust sharpening and simply copy the file to the target folder. If not, then I would set the quality setting to 100, or some value at or above the jpg compression used by your camera when writing whatever jpg quality you've specified in the camera. LR's quality setting is likely to be in the range of 95 or higher if you've chosen the highest quality setting in your camera.

FWIW I stopped saving jpg files shortly after I began to use Lightroom (in version 1 at the time) as I found they they added no benefit to my workflow. Raw files give me far greater control over the final image, and I rarely send out an image that has had no post processing whatsoever. Jpgs are easy enough to produce on demand from Lightroom, especially since I might need several different flavors of the jpeg depending on where it was going (size, sharpening, watermarking, etc.). By eliminating the jpg, I also cut down on the volume of data the camera needs to process and store at the moment of capture. There was just no upside associated with capturing jpgs for my needs.

 

[Neutronensturm]

My problem is that I am sharing jpgs between different PCs with different users. The edits must be visible with an arbitrary image viewer. So I have to have a directory tree for final edits for the other machines. And my RAWs are 20MB of size which is why I used only to keep the JPGs unless the images were very good.