I'm wondering if Aperture has a way to update or overwrite the JPEG preview that is embedded in RAW files?
My aim is to have a single RAW file, that has a high quality JPEG preview embedded in it. This appears to be possible using Lightroom and exporting a DNG with a full size preview, but I would love to know if Aperture has a way to accomplish this.
Aperture is a bit of a captive environment. Once you import photos into it, you have to keep them there as Aperture knows everything about them - metadata, adjustments, etc. You can export versions, but you cannot create DNGs that contain all of that info. For that reason I believe Apple is careful in their statements about the degree to which they support DNG. They can import it, but they do not export it. That’s a shame, but I support it is in Apple’s best interest to not export it as they want you to use Aperture as your DAM. They don’t really help you maintain offsite / online backups as you wish to do via dphoto.com.
Photographer | https://www.walterrowe.com | https://instagram.com/walter.rowe.photo
Unfortunately Aperture doesn’t support DNG files completely versus Lightroom. I’ve opened a bug report with Apple about this. I encourage you to do the same thing. I’d prefer Apple to be able to export a version as a DNG file but it cannot. Aperture will write the metadata back out to the raw file, but doesn’t update the embedded preview.
Photographer | https://www.walterrowe.com | https://instagram.com/walter.rowe.photo
Thanks for the info Walter, I’ll go file a bug report now. At this stage I’m actually considering moving to Lightroom just for DNGs with updated previews.
(With those DNG’s I can do a single export to www.dphoto.com and have my RAW files backed up, as well as a perfect version for display in the gallery. All other options seem to require 2 exports - an original for the RAW and a version for color accurate gallery display)