kb6kgx Loc: Simi Valley, CA

I have two RAW images that I want to upload to a friend's dropbox. But when I drag-and-drop the files into it, they upload as .jpeg files, and are about 1 MB in size.

How can I send the RAW images, which are about 28 MB in size?

Computer is an iMac using Apple's Photos.

WAstinkbug Loc: Silverdale, WA, U.S.A.

Hmm... I think if you have them loaded into Photos, you have to choose your image and go to the export command in the drop-down menu ... and export the "unmodified original." You should have a RAW file after doing that. Drag and drop does yield a JPG version of the RAW file.

kb6kgx Loc: Simi Valley, CA

I realize that drag and drop creates a jpg. I'll check the "export command", as you said. I never thought of that.

jlg1000 Loc: Uruguay / South America

Just more simple, drag the photos from Finder, not Photos

That the silly Apple thingies I hate and that some people love.

Bayou

Yes. I never let a program move files around. File management should be done directly from the system's native file manager.

gvarner Loc: Central Oregon Coast

Excellent advice. It’s why I don’t use Photos on my PC. It likes to do things the way it wants to do them. Its "defaults" are full of faults.

kb6kgx Loc: Simi Valley, CA

Worked like a charm! 👍

HRBIEL Loc: Rapid City, SD

Here is a solution:

https://wetransfer.com/

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

When using Photos, they are imported into a secure package file that average users cannot access. Export Unmodified Original is the proper choice.

jlg1000 Loc: Uruguay / South America

Each time a I hear that a simple OS operation like moving files around requires making step XXX, then select option YYY, then choose ZZZ, and so on, what I really hear is "the software vendor thinks you are not capable on doing it and all means should be taking to not allow you to do it".

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Apple makes managing your images very easy, provided you follow their model. I do, for iPhone images only. It's a very slick system! But for my serious work, I bypass Photos and Image Capture entirely, and use the Adobe Photography Plan apps (Photoshop and Lightroom Classic).

Photos and Lightroom Classic (LrC) are similar in that they both do image cataloging and parametric adjustments. LrC, however, is far more capable and sophisticated.

For the vast majority of iPhone, iPad, and Mac users, who are NOT computer literate and don't want to be, Photos makes sense because it prevents them from accidentally deleting their images. Make an exposure on your phone, and it is sent to the iCloud server. Turn on your iPad or Mac, and it downloads to it. Photos works much the same way on all three devices, so it's drop-dead convenient. But it IS limiting. If you want more, you have to export the file to another application, then import it back into Photos to share it or archive it, provided you want everything in one place.

That said, the same is true of Lightroom Classic. It doesn't hide your photos, though. It leaves them where you want it to find them, importing only a link to that location, and saving metadata in the catalog, along with a thumbnail you view in LrC. You can export to Photoshop or another application to do more, much the way you would send a file from Photos to Raw Power or Affinity Photo and back.

frankraney Loc: Clovis, Ca.

Deleted, already solved.

frankraney Loc: Clovis, Ca.

chrissybabe Loc: New Zealand

Another example of a 26 year old university graduate with little life experience telling me that I am as thick as two planks so I am going to set things up how I think they should be for your own protection.
How program writers arrive at some defaults defies my imagination as to what or who they think are out there. This example happens to be for Apple but don't think for a minute that Microsoft aren't at least as guilty. Of all the classes of problems I have the biggest is working out what has gone wrong only to find it was a default setting and I then have to spend time finding out how to delete it.

jlg1000 Loc: Uruguay / South America

I agree that these... ahh, methods, might be ok for people that don't know and don't want to know what a filesystem is.

But, I happen to share the same control paranoia as all sysadmins: I want to know exactly where my files are and how they are organized. And I'll cut the fingers of anyone that's mess with my files.

Therefore I download all my photos in a strict directory structure: //<server_name>/Photography/RAW/<camera_model>/<year>/<month>/<YYYYMMDD_theme>/<DCS_NNNNN.ARW>

Then I import the photos into Capture One, leaving them where there are.

I hold many petabytes of engineering workfiles, and all of them share that very same structure which has being growing for decades... I make symlinks to other structures across servers for quick access.

And I backup everything to a local NAS daily.

And I backup the NAS to *two* cloud storage services incrementally 24x7

And sometimes I still awake at night after having nightmares about losing data