How to uncrop Ricoh GR III / IIIx photos

Feb 25, 2025

Ricoh GR III and IIIx cameras feature an in-camera crop mode, allowing you to crop in the 28mm field of view of the III to either 35mm or 50mm, or to crop the IIIx’s native 40mm field of view to 50mm or 75mm. This is great for gaining a little extra reach while shooting, but sometimes I find I wish I could recover the wider view during editing. It turns out this is possible!

When using the crop functionality, the camera records the original view but embeds a crop in the EXIF data. You can use the following exiftool commands at the terminal if you wish:

exiftool -DefaultCropOrigin="5 6" R0004690.DNG
exiftool -DefaultCropSize="6000 4000" R0004690.DNG

In fact, the cameras record a little extra information than the native crop, which you can access via the following:

exiftool -DefaultCropOrigin="0 0" R0004690.DNG
exiftool -DefaultCropSize="6010 4012" R0004690.DNG

However, if you are a Lightroom user, you can avoid the command line by using the DNG Recover Edge plug-in created by Adobe. They no longer offer a download directly on their website, but you can still grab it thanks to the Wayback Machine. The download page is available here but the “Get file” button will not work if clicked directly. Instead, right click it, select “Copy link” and paste it into your URL bar—or simply click here.

In Lightroom, go to File > Plug-in Manager… then click the Add button. Find the plugin in your Downloads folder, and open it.

With the plugin added, navigate to a DNG from your Ricoh GR camera that is is cropped, then click File > Plug-in Extras > Apply. On macOS, you will probably see the following security message:

A screenshot showing a warning that Apple will not run DNGRecoverEdgesMac because it can not verify it is free from malware.

To resolve it, open System Settings, find the Security tab, and then scroll down to the bottom until you see the following message, and click “Allow Anyway.”

A screenshot highlighting the 'Allow Anyway' button under the Security tab of System Settings

When you try again, macOS will give another warning, but this time you will be able to tell macOS to allow the plugin to run.

When run, the plugin will create a new file with the suffix “_full.dng”. The new file will initially show the same crop as the original, but now when you use the crop tool set to “As Shot” you’ll get the full 6010 x 4012 resolution.

P.S. If you’re an Android user struggling to download images from your Ricoh GR using the official Image Sync app, consider trying Eureka, an app I built to deal with connection issues I experienced with the original app.