I’ve been going through my photo collection and discovered I have gigabytes of photos stored in my camera’s RAW format (Olympus’ ORF format, in my case). Some of these photos have the potential to be great and just need some fine-tuning to really make them shine so would benefit from being in RAW, but the majority of them are just snapshots and I don’t want 15MB snapshot stored in my Dropbox forever. I don’t want to delete them but I only want to keep the much smaller JPG versions.
In some cases, I had the JPG + RAW option switched on so it was just a matter of deleting the RAW versions I don’t need but some folders only have the RAW versions, so I need to convert them to JPG files. There are some online converters but I have hundreds or thousands of 15MB RAW files so I don’t think uploading them all is a good idea.
MacOS/OSX has a great built-in terminal tool called sips, which will, among other things, convert RAW files to JPEGs, and has lots of other options.
To convert a whole folder, just open Terminal, navigate to the folder of RAW photos that you want to convert, and run the following command:
for i in *.ORF; do sips -s format jpeg $i --out "${i%.*}.jpg"; done
This will create a JPG version of each of your photos and you can then choose to delete the RAWs if you’d like.
Adapted from https://coderwall.com/p/nhp7mq/convert-raw-photos-to-jpg-in-the-mac-os-terminal
See Also
Andy's Blog 