Archiving photos: DNG, XMP and container

[Maik Qualmann]

Hmm, I would personally change the text and not necessarily recommend 
converting to DNG. It is possible that the Libraw team will stop working at 
some point and no successor team will be found, and that older RAW formats may 
suddenly no longer be supported, anything is possible. But you still have time 
to convert with an older version. Provided you check the current status every 
few years.
I also don't think it's a good idea to convert to currently popular formats 
like HEIF, AVIF, JXL or similar. There are still too many changes and 
developments in these formats.
However, long-term archiving is generally a difficult topic.

Maik

Am Donnerstag, 4. Juli 2024, 16:07:59 MESZ schrieb Henrik Hemrin:
> To save photos and related data to be accessible in long term is
> interesting. The chapter Keep Up With Technology recommends to convert
> RAW to DNG, and to place everything including XMP inside a DNG Container.
> 
> If I want to do as above, I am still uncertain of procedure in detail.
> 
> 1)
> Should I best convert it to DNG directly, before I do any editing,
> versions, tagging, face tagging, description etc, or when should I best
> convert it to DNG?
> 
> 2)
> And how do I put the XMP into a DNG Container? Is that done at writing
> meta data to file? Write to sidecar will as I understand place the XMP
> file outside the container as a separate file. The word "container" is
> for me multiple files in a container, but here I am not sure if DNG is
> the container or if it should be another DNG layer. Maybe I have missed
> something in my reading, apologize if that is the case.
> 
> Reference:
> https://docs.digikam.org/en/asset_management/data_protection.html#keep-up-wi
> th-technology
> 
> Best regards
> Henrik Hemrin