Cannot stitch a panorama from Nikon RAW files when the lens profile is built-in

Question

I recently spent a frustrating couple of hours trying to merge a series of photos to a panorama in Lightroom Classic. The merge fails with a message that the photos lack a lens profile. It turns out that my Nikon lens has a "built in" profile, so none is provided in Lightroom. Lightroom does report that the profile is built-in, but it won't use that information to complete a panorama. After rummaging about with an AI chatbot, it seems that this is a shortcoming of Lightroom Classic (a bug?). The preferred workaround is to convert the images to DNG, then repeat the merger. This does work. But it's not at all obvious, and it isn't normal to have to convert to DNG.. Is it likely that Adobe will fix this so one doesn't have to spend so much time on figuring out how to do what used to be a straightforward process?

Lightroom Classic 15.1

macOS Tahoe 26.2

johnrellis · Answer

Hmm, I've merged raws with built-in lens profiles to hundreds of panoramas over the past many years. If this alone were the issue, then given how many cameras embed built-in lens profiles, we would have seen a gazillion reports here about this over the years.

There's likely something much more specific going wrong in your case. Share two sample raws that won't merge and we can investigate what's going wrong and file an actionable bug report if necessary. If the forum won't let you attach the files here, upload them to Wetransfer, Dropbox, Google Drive or similar free service and post the sharing link here.

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