sidecar - How to view side-car JPGs on lightroom? How to easily manage RAW+JPEG image reviews?

I've been shooting RAW+JPEG and I'm importing them together into Lightroom (i.e. the JPEG becomes a side-car of the RAW file).

trouble is, I can't seem to find a way to review the out-of-camera JPEG (as opposed to Lightroom's rendition of the RAW file). How can I switch view between different side-cars of the same image in Lightroom?

For what is worth, I need a way to view different side cars (e.g. the JPEG that accompanies the RAW image), not decoupling them. For one, having them linked makes the first review and deletion of unwanted files a lot easier as I do not have to delete twice.

Answer

Ok, after some research my conclusion is:

• you can't see side-car files in Lightroom

and also that

• Lightroom does not really support a RAW+JPEG workflow

By RAW+JPEG workflow I meant being able to:

1. 
   

   (at the user's discretion) Review both files together, while being able to tag both files at once (say, mark both files as Rejected with a single command).

   
   


2. 
   
   

   (at the user's discretion) review either file on its own and tag only one of them.

   
   

After browsing a lot of pages with non-sensical advice, my conclusion is that most people talking about using Lightroom for RAW+JPEG management never really tried to practice any of their advice.

For instance Laura Shoe on RAW+JPEG, her (mis)advice is to either manage both files separately or use auto-stacking. The trouble with Lightroom's auto-stacking is it does not allow you to tag all files in the stack with a single command. So you can't just go through a stack of 1 RAW + 1 JPEG and just hit X to mark both as excluded.

There is a user feedback thread at Photoshop.com asking for this feature.

In the mean time, people that need/want this are using Breezebrowser or Photomechanic to do this. Here is a user review of using Photomechanic for RAW+JPEG.