Get RAW files out of Photos app

Hi guys. Just joined and looking for some advice. I need to free up some space on my iMac and it seems that my RAW picture files are taking up a lot of space. My camera, Nikon D750, has a feature to save a .jpg and a RAW file at the same time. MacOS photos has a feature to import the RAW along with the jpg, although you won’t see two files, just the jpg. You can switch it over to RAW via the edit menu later if you want more editing options.

My question is: is there are way to export just the RAW files out and keep only the jpg’s? I want to export them out and save them to an external disk.

Running Catalina 10.15.7 with the latest version of photos.

Thanks. Glad I found this group.

Will the external disk be connected to the iMac all the time? If it will be then you could just relocate your whole photo library to the external disk. This might be quicker and less involved than trying to extract just the RAW files and moving those on the external drive.

I forgot to add the link showing how to do this to my last message.

You can find the ones you want to operate on by making a Smart Album with the rule “Photo is RAW”. Sorry, I’m not sure what you have to do (if anything) to separate the RAW-format file from the JPG-format file.

I might do this and export the RAWs out. Then delete all the photos in that smart album. That should do the trick. Let me know if anyone sees a problem with this.

Turns out the smart album for RAWs only finds the raws that are set as RAWs or that were independently imported as RAW. Turns out there’s no easy way to do this, apart from exporting all the photos that have JPG+RAW pairs and deleting the RAW part and importing only the JPGs back in as documented here: https://blog.fosketts.net/2017/07/24/remove-raw-images-apple-photos-icloud/

What a headache. I will for sure be going to apple.com/feedback and asking for this to be made easier in an update.