RAW file transfer

How it works

A RAW frame is often 30–80 MB. A day's shoot is tens of gigabytes. Zip helps little. Sidecar XMP files hold the edits and must travel with the RAW or the grade is lost. The transfer is binary. Completion is frame count plus sidecars plus a manifest hash.

A photographer ships 600 RAW files, 42 GB, plus 600 XMP sidecars. The folder job sends the RAW folder and skips dotfiles and sidecars because the tool hid them. The studio opens ungraded frames and assumes the photographer did not edit. A manifest that lists xmp would have failed the job before anyone opened a frame.

How it differs

RAW transfer is not a JPEG handoff. The JPEG is a derivative. Clients who only needed selects should get JPEGs. Clients who will grade need RAW and sidecars.

Proprietary RAW needs the vendor's reader at the destination. A successful copy that no app opens is a format miss, not a short file.

Card names restart at IMG_0001. Two cards in one folder collide. Use per-card prefixes.

On the ticket

• The practical close is a log line: time, actor, byte count, result.
• Without that line the transfer is a story.
• With it, the next person can see whether this door did what the ticket claimed.
• If the path is shared, say so in the partner profile so a later change does not silently pick a different limit, key, or region.