Should I keep the separate JPEG from RAW+JPEG, or just extract the JPEG preview from the RAW?

Question

I shoot in RAW+JPEG mode. When I inspect the camera-made JPEG with ImageMagick, it reports a higher JPEG quality value than the JPEG preview embedded inside the RAW from the same shot. The embedded preview is also much smaller in file size, though both look similar unless I compare pixels closely.

If I do not plan to manually process every RAW file, is there any practical reason to keep the standalone JPEGs from RAW+JPEG mode? Or is it usually fine to batch-extract the embedded JPEG previews from the RAW files instead? How significant is the quality difference in real use?

user26575 · Accepted Answer

To concentrate on what you should do, I suggest you stick to the raw+jpeg. Worst case you need another card and storage is cheap. Do you actually ever get close to filling all your cards? If not, you don't need to worry.

My reasoning is that, like you (by the sound of things) I like to print or otherwise use a lot of my pictures as shot. But sometimes a picture is worth a bit of work that benefits from the raw. This is true for anything from wildlife to family snaps.

With family pictures in particular, being able to send the as-shot jpeg immediately to relatives is good, if they then printed it out big with jpeg artifacts it would annoy me when I saw it.

There is a clue in your question: "raw preview". That really is all it's good for.

Should I keep the separate JPEG from RAW+JPEG, or just extract the JPEG preview from the RAW?

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