I've been very conflicted with regards to the Adobe DNG "universal RAW format". I've always liked a lot about it and after reading Bruce Fraser's "Camera RAW for the Real World" I *really* like it and want to adopt it for all my archiving. But I hate to lose the EXIF information that it throws away, specifically the information on the lens used for each shot.
So I was recently delighted to notice that if I use Camera RAW to convert PEF image into a JPEG in Photoshop, the resulting JPEG contains all the original EXIF data, including lens type. And CAMERA RAW will do batch conversions. Hooray! Problem solved! I just batch convert to small, low quality JPEGS and I've got ready-made thumbnails with all my EXIF data! Then I can run the DNG batch converter and ditch the PEF files. But noooooo... If you *batch* convert with Camera RAW it seems you don't get the lens type EXIF data that's retained when you convert one at a time. <Insert sound of head being smacked repeatedly against a wall.> Then I thought of having a look at the Pentax Browser to see if it might batch convert to JPEG thumbnails, assuming that *it* would retain all the EXIF data. Got something even better: Pentax Browser will export just the EXIF data from all the images and put it into a comma-delimited text file! Yes, it will also do the small-JPEG-conversion-while-retaining-EXIF that I had hoped for, but saving just the text data is vastly quicker and results in much less extra data to store. Now what I really don't need is for someone to explain to me a much simpler way I could have been doing this all along... ;-)
