How do I downgrade a RAW photo to a JPEG in Lightroom?

Question

Sometimes, I have photos which, instead of being kept in DNG format, could be converted to JPEG: - In museums, when I make a photo of artwork, I also take a photo of a label with the name of the artwork, the author, the description and other info. Switching back and forth between RAW and JPEG during the shooting is possible, but I would prefer not wasting the time doing it. - When creating panoramas in Lightroom 6, I prefer keeping the original photos if later, I decide to use a better panorama stitching software. This also means that having an additional 500 MB DNG file for the panorama itself isn't particularly useful, since I can always recreate it later. - Some photos are purely “technical” and don't have to be retouched later. For instance, if I take a photo of a piece of hardware, I want to keep it in the catalog in order to be able to find it later when I need it; but it's not the sort of photos where I would need to adjust the exposure or the saturation, because nobody cares about the artistic aspects of it.Right now, what I do is that I: - Export the photo from Lightroom as JPEG, - Remove the original from Lightroom catalog, - Move the exported JPEG to the directory where it is supposed to be, - Add the JPEG to the catalog (which is very time consuming, since Lightroom won't let me specify the directory through copy-paste, so I have to manually work through the tree to select the corresponding folder.)Is there an easier way to tell Lightroom that it should replace original DNG files by their respective JPEGs? I could imagine a command silimar to *Library* > *Convert photo to DNG...*, but I can't see any such option in the menu.

Answer 1

One way to expedite this workflow a bit: after exporting the JPG and deleting the DNG file, drag the new JPG onto the LR icon, which will automatically bring up the import window with the JPG located (that way you won't have to navigate through directories).

What camera are you using that creates 500mb files? I have a very high-res Sony A7RIII that makes 50mb files. Hard drives are so cheap now; you can get a 4TB drive for $90, so you might want to consider whether it's worth the time to save a bit of space by converting to JPG. With LR, as you probably know, you can have files on your computer's internal drive as well as external drives.