Removing Embedded JPGs from Nikon NEF Files with Exiftool

I've been migrating away from Capture NX2 to Lightroom for editing my raw NEF's.  But I'm not quite ready to convert completely from NEF to DNG (Digital Negatives.)  I still might want to edit the photo in Capture - the control points are just too useful.  One tempting advantage of DNG is that they are reportedly a little smaller than NEF.

 Why are the DNGs smaller?  I believe it is due to the NEF's embedded jpgs.  But Lightroom doesn't really need the jpeg rendering that is stored in the NEF and I could always recreate them later.  So how can I drop them?

 Exiftool!

+Jeffrey Friedl's blog post at http://regex.info/blog/2006-12-08/303 put me on the right track, but I think his information is out of date now.  I found that my NEF had three jpgs:
  • JpgFromRaw (Full Size!)
  • OtherImage (Fairly large!)
  • PreviewImage (Thumbnail-ish)
Let's see how big the are in an NEF that is 44133771 bytes:

$ exiftool -list D8H_2754_20131001_183719.NEF  | egrep Binary\ data
[...]
Jpg From Raw                    : (Binary data 3492514 bytes, use -b option to extract)
Other Image                     : (Binary data 858341 bytes, use -b option to extract)
Preview Image                   : (Binary data 99052 bytes, use -b option to extract)&nbsp

I first attempted to just replace the JpgFromRaw with the PreviewImage.  That worked, but then I would be just duplicating the jpg -- but here is how you do it:

$ exiftool -v -JpgFromRaw\<PreviewImage 2754_20131001_183719.NEF
$ exiftool -v -OtherImage\<PreviewImage 2754_20131001_183719.NEF

So how do I just delete them?  Just delete the tags:

$ exiftool -JpgFromRaw= -OtherImage= -overwrite_original_in_place -P 2754_20131001_183719.NEF

(I'm leaving the smallest (~100KB) PreviewImage)

I ran this on a folder of about 11GB of NEFs and when done, the folder was 9.1GB.  That's 17% smaller!

I'm going to limit it to this folder for now, but will expand this to other parts of my archives as I gain more confidence that I really don't need the embedded jpgs.

Update:  This requires exiftool 9.03 -> Topic: "Otherimage" in NEFs of D800

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