My son returned from two weeks in Australia with over 800 photographs taken with my old Dimage A2 camera. We imported all the files, from four memory cards, into Lightroom. When we imported the files, we had a couple of issues to deal with:
1. He shot RAW + JPG, so we put all the JPGs in separate folders.
2. The camera was set to restart numbering on each memory card, so we had to set up a new folder for each card (within a top level folder – 2012_5 Australia) because the file names were duplicated across the memory cards.
3. He had his ISO setting wrong and shot all his shots at ISO400, which results in a grainy image that we corrected with large synchonizations of noise and sharpening settings. (In post, not on import.) Because of this, I don' want to just delete everything and re-do the import, though we still have the images on the memory cards.
After making all the noise corrections and other post processing fixes, we have a good selection of photographs, but they seem to be rearranged from how we set them up originally:
1. All the completed files are now in one folder and have a suffix added to the file name so that there is no duplication. This is fine, except that we didn't set it this way in the folders. I'd like to understand how they got rearranged and renumbered.
2. Three of the four folders we set up for the RAW files now have only 34k “OpenOffice.org 1.1 Configuration File” documents with the original file names. (No suffixes.) I suspect these are sidecar files and Windows does not know what they are so it uses the type-name for my text editor, OpenOffice. I tested deleting one of these files and it did not seem to affect the Lr copy of the image. The forth of these folders has the original MRW files, which are also in the top folder as DNGs. Must have been an import error there. None of these four folders show in Lr, only in Windows.
3. We have four folders of the JPG files, which seem to be unchanged, but they are also pretty bad due to the ISO issue and I don't want them in Lr anymore.
My questions are:
1. What are the “OpenOffice” files? I'm thinking they may be XMP sidecar files though I don't know why they wouldn't show up as such in Windows. Also, I converted from MRW to DNG on import, so there shouldn't be any sidecar files. If I delete them will I lose all my Lr settings?
2. I want to remove all the JPG files from Lr and Windows. Is the best way to delete them to remove them from Lr first, then delete them on disk after wards?
3. How does Lr handle multiple images with the same file number? I assumed this would create a problem if I put them into the same folder, but if Lr is clever enough to see they are really different files and renumbers them, I needn’t have worried about it and just imported them all into the same folder.
Thanks for your help. The images, btw, are not up to what I would have wanted due to the ISO issue, but I have to say that Sidney, The Apostles and The Blue Mountains, where he toured, certainly have plenty of excellent photographic opportunities. This was one of his successes; it is a four image panorama.
