iPhoto Exporting "Current" Edited Jpeg

The background is that since the photos app is coming out soon, I am thinking about exporting all my edited jpegs and put them in the photos library.

Why do you want to export the photos to migrate them to the new Photos.app?

You can simply open your iPhoto library in Photos, and the photos will be migrated losslessly. Photos can read an iPhoto Library and migrate all photos with all titles, captions, keywords, edits, also all your albums and smart albums.

If you export the photos, a large part of your current organisation will be lost.

See Terence Devlin's User Tip: Exporting From iPhoto

Kind "Current" has only Preview quality, a medium quality JPEG. If you are exporting to migrate your photos, export as "Original", plus the current version.

Any export of a JPEG creates a totally new JPEG which is always of lower quality than the original (usually not enough to worry about is you use maximum quality - but the recompression still adds loss)

Since there is a direct upgrade path form iphoto (and Aperture) to Photos and since both iphoto and Aperture will continue to operate even if you are using Photos why are you making work for yourself that will not give you the best result?

Wait for the release and try Photos and then take any decisions you find necessary

LN

What ever you want - I believe you are creating unnecessary complexity and until Photos is released every decision is based on speculation - once you have the facts then is a better time to take action

and as to

As for organization, I'm pretty dead set on using a collaboration of Lightroom for editing and Photos for managing hence i would like to get a head start.

that is not possible with iPhoto and I doubt that it will be possible with Photos although again until it is released everything is speculation

LN

but the reason for doing so is i want to keep Photos library as clean as possible.

Seriously, you need to ask yourself, what on earth is a "dirty" Photos Library? That concept makes no sense to me.

I am simply planning to use photos as a managing software to create events etc for future browsing. No edits whatsoever will be done in the photos app since editing yields you a duplicate of almost the same size which takes up significant amount of space

If that's ll you're doing you don't need - and should not use - a photo manager design specifically for non-destructive editing. It's only adding layers of complexity to your workflow. Just keep you photos in folders and use an image browser.

Plus, I have basically migrated towards taking RAW files

That makes even less sense. You cannot do anything with a Raw without first processing it into something else - like a Jog. You can't view it, print it, anything. You're idea is not quite thought through.

Best advice I can give you: Pick one horse and ride it.

Photos is a Photo Manager with non-destructive processing. It's a free app and quite a capable one

Lightroom is a Photo manager with non-destructive processing. It's not free but it is far more capable that Photos, as you might expect.

But what you're talking about doing is two apps to do the same job: manage photos. You don't need to do that. One is enough. There's no reason not to have Raws and Jpegs in the same library. They're photos. It makes life much simpler. Why would you write one chapter of a Novel in Word and the next in TextEdit? It makes no sense.

Export the Photos from iPhoto. Don't use the Current setting as that will not get all the metadata. You'll get a similar file size from the second-highest quality Jpeg.