Now that Darktable and other software packages are supporting the Fuji lossless compressed raw format, I’m wondering if I can convert my old, uncompressed Fuji raw files to the lossless compressed format? I haven’t been able to find anything online about it. It would be nice to save some of that disk space…
I always advise against converting away from the original raw file format, as you never know what can happen and verifying that everything went well in the conversion would be a laborious task.
On top of that, no computing commodity is cheaper than storage in the present time.
That makes sense. I was hoping that Fuji offered some utility to compress the raw files using the same algorithms as the in-camera software, which should (hypothetically) avoid bugs/errors in the conversion.
Good point - hard drives are cheap!
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In some cases you can get relevant compression just piping your raw files through LZMA or a similar generic compression algorithm. So for instance taking the fuji raw from this play raw, I get a ~50% reduction in file size from compressing it using lzma, and ~30% using gzip.
The benefit is that you save some disk space and still keep the original file. The drawback is that compression (at least using LZMA) takes quite a bit of cpu time and the files are more susceptible to bitrot and as far as I know most asset management software doesn’t directly support reading compressed files.
It could be a quite nice feature though. At least gzipping files can be done at nearly the speed the are read from a sd card and reading + decompressing a file from a magnetic disk is often faster than reading the decompressed version.
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