... I wanted to reprocess 30 of my street images . Its incredibly easy to find things in LR. So I do a select on the 30 images and export them to a new folder managed by Mac OS folder structure. I specified export originals . If these were .NEF s they would be originals and a sideccar .xmp would be created . But as DNG s they get the full treatment from LR . So for some applications no problem......but I didn t now the deal was re formating to adobe standards. Thats not my definition of non destructive.
So I will have my unaltered archive and no way to find anything?
I do know how to work around this but its not easy . This isn t a new problem with integrated software products.....but LR could have done this differently simply by treating the DNG file as a raw . They aren t messing with the .NEF files.
Exporting (to LR) means "create a new file based on the information I have already". The Original option means the original file
format, not the original file. In the case of a native RAW file, that's the .NEF (or whatever) plus .XMP; for a DNG original, it's a new DNG with all the added information embedded. If you just want a file copied, use the "Show in Finder" command to find them in the repository and copy them to a new place. Lightroom does not have a direct "copy the files" function, it's not a file manager in that sense.
Why do you export the 30 files to a new folder anyway? Seems a waste of space ...
If the goal is to reprocess thirty RAW images to a new rendering, put the thirty files into a collection as virtual copies to work on them, change the rendering to your heart's delight, and export the finished product. That's the advantage of using LR to do the work.
Alternatively, select the thirty files, then use the "Export as Catalog..." command and have LR copy them. Now you have your thirty DNGs copied to another place without Exporting ("re-creating") them and putting in other information. Move that to whereever you like and then do whatever it is you want to do.
Another alternative is to make a list of your thirty files then go to the backup file repository and retrieve the thirty originals if you must have them, should be a simple matter of searching out and copying them by file name to whatever new destination you have in mind.
BTW: Applications that do not implement the full DNG specification and therefore get screwed up when anything other than some rigidly defined OEM contents are there aren't worth my trouble to use them. Aperture is like that too: it won't read linearly represented DNG files, etc. I feed it only TIFFs.