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Old Sony RAW files do not need old Sony software. Convertessa decodes .sr2 through LibRaw and writes a standard JPG with libvips, at the capture's own pixel count and the quality you choose. A folder of DSC-R1 or Cyber-shot files converts in a single pass, entirely on your Mac — including files that stall in applications that only ever learned ARW.
Sony has shipped three RAW extensions. .srf came first, with the DSC-F828 in 2003. .sr2 followed on the DSC-R1 and a few late Cyber-shots in 2005. .arw arrived with the Alpha line in 2006 and never left. Everything Sony has written since is ARW — which is why an .sr2 folder is so often the one directory nothing on a modern Mac will open. The application supports Sony RAW. It does not support this Sony RAW.
SR2 is TIFF-derived, but Sony did not leave all of it in the clear: the tags carrying white balance and calibration data are scrambled behind a simple cipher. Independent decoders read those files at all only because the cipher was reverse-engineered years ago and folded into dcraw, and from there into LibRaw. Convertessa's image engine, libvips, links against LibRaw, so the decode follows that well-tested path rather than falling back on the embedded preview.
None of it is reversible. Treat the JPGs as output and keep the .sr2 files: they are the only copy of the unrendered capture you will ever have.
Drag one .sr2 or the whole folder your old Cyber-shot cards were dumped into. Convertessa reads the RAW payload through LibRaw, so no Sony application has to be installed or licensed first.
Choose JPG and set the quality. For archive copies of 10-megapixel captures, high or max is worth the extra megabytes; there is not much file size to save at this resolution anyway.
Start the run. Each SR2 is demosaiced and written as a full-resolution JPG into the destination you picked, with the .sr2 files left in place as the masters you keep.
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No. They are two generations of Sony's RAW work: SR2 belongs to the 2005 Cyber-shot era, ARW arrived with the Alpha line in 2006 and became the format Sony has used ever since. Both descend from TIFF, but the tag layouts and the sensor data differ enough that software written for one does not necessarily read the other. That mismatch is usually why an old .sr2 folder stalls in an application handling every modern Sony file you own.
The DSC-R1 is the one most people still have — Sony's 2005 fixed-lens bridge camera with an APS-sized 10.3-megapixel CMOS sensor, unusual at the time for offering live view from that sensor. A few late Cyber-shot models of the same period wrote SR2 as well. The earlier DSC-F828 used .srf, a related but separate format. Files from an Alpha body are ARW, whatever the folder happens to be called.
The camera applied contrast, saturation and sharpening while writing its JPEG. The .sr2 stored the sensor data from before any of that. A LibRaw decode gives you a neutral rendering with white balance as recorded and a standard tone curve — deliberately conservative, because adding contrast later is easy and recovering a clipped highlight is not. Plan on an editing pass if you want the camera's look back.
No, and the difference is visible. Most RAW files carry a small baked JPEG so file browsers have something to display; extracting that is fast and gives you a fraction of the resolution. Convertessa runs the real decode — demosaicing the sensor array through LibRaw, encoding the result with libvips — so a DSC-R1 frame lands as a full 3888 x 2592 image rather than a thumbnail-sized one.
If these JPGs are standing in for files nothing can open, go high. convertessa ./sr2/*.sr2 --to jpg --quality max -o ~/Sony_JPG writes the least-compromised JPG the format allows, at the cost of size. The high preset (90) is very close and noticeably smaller; web (60) suits images that will be looked at once in a browser. Either way, keep the .sr2 originals — a JPG cannot be turned back into one.
Converting the .sr2 once is a single lossy step. Opening that JPG and saving it again is a second, and JPG re-encoding compounds: edges soften, and blocking creeps into flat areas like sky. If you expect to edit, convert the RAW to a lossless target such as PNG or TIFF, do the work there, and export the JPG at the very end. One encode, as late as possible.