Today’s Question: I just imported some images from a birding outing and was surprised when Lightroom Classic told me that all were converted to DNG. I have no idea how that happened, so my question is, did I inadvertently turn on some switch somewhere? Also, is this a bad thing, or should I just move past this and edit as I would normally, or do I need to reimport them as raw?
Tim’s Quick Answer: This indicates that you had the “Copy as DNG” option selected in the Import dialog, causing the raw captures to be converted to the Adobe DNG format upon import. You can re-import the raw captures from your media cards using the “Copy” option if you’d prefer to retain the proprietary raw image files rather than DNG copies.
More Detail: When importing photos from a media card into Lightroom Classic you can choose whether you simply want to copy the images to the desired folder location or copy them as Adobe DNG (Digital Negative) images. In this case the “Copy as DNG” option was obviously selected, causing the captures to be converted to DNG and copied to the destination folder. This approach means that as soon as you format the media cards so they can be used again, the original proprietary raw captures will be lost forever.
In general, there isn’t any great harm caused by converting to DNG and discarding the proprietary raw captures, and some would argue there are benefits to converting to DNG. I recommend choosing which option makes the most sense to you and then using that approach consistently.
In this case, then, my preference would be to re-import the images using the “Copy” option at the top-center of the Import dialog, to copy the original proprietary raw capture files to the destination folder while adding them to the Lightroom Classic catalog. Once that import is completed successfully, I would select only the DNG files that were created during the first import and delete them.
Keep in mind, however, that it would also be perfectly fine to simply retain the DNG copies of the imported photos, and even to continue using the “Copy to DNG” option for future imports. I personally prefer to retain the original captures as they were created by the camera, but converting to DNG on import is a perfectly reasonable workflow approach as well.
