[Affinity Photo] Huge file sizes!?

[Fixx]

17 hours ago, Ben said:

It is fine to backup to an external device, but why would you chose to throttle performance by working directly on a USB device?

USB3 is quite fast, if you are using old fashioned HDD then USB3 is fast enough. SSD is another story, but you need a big one with affinity file sizes :-D

I tend to use internal SSD for immediate work, second internal HDD for secondary work, wirefire drive for LR photo library, USB drives for backup and media storage.

[IanSG]

On 8/7/2018 at 3:41 PM, Ben said:

but why would you chose to throttle performance by working directly on a USB device?

I don't, but using an HDD in a USB3 cradle provides very satisfactory performance.  

<edit>

Great minds etc. (although this one didn't notice there was another page of replies!).

[Ben]

So, I've done some initial testing with us moving over to ZStandard.  First impressions are good - a modest improvement in compression ratio, and a considerable improvement in compression/decompression speed.  So - after some more testing looks like we might be going for it.

 

I'm also testing a few ideas to help us further improve on compression ratio.  Initial tests have gained between 2% and 8% for my sample 16-bit documents.  8-bit documents remain unchanged - think I've already squeezed all I can there with our immediate compression methods.  I'm next going to explore possibilities for some proprietary methods to see if we can gain any more.

[Alex_M]

Sounds exciting!

[Fixx]

I kinda wish Affinity would consider a save mode that would jettison not crucial file content when saving a file for archiving. It could be as simple as "save as". "Save as" would save a lean barebones file, and simple "save" would keep the caches and watchamacallits for performance. That is, when you open "save as" file, AP would start building mipmaps etc from zero and it would take some time to get up to speed.

Then I do not know how much disk space saving this would give, would it be of practical use.

[Ben]

At best removing mipmaps would save 25% of the overall image data size, but it's not as straight forward as that as the document file contains other data and so I'd estimate a best case saving of 20%.

Save-As already removes redundancy from the af file, so gives you a best size (but including mipmaps).  I'm not sure what the mood would be like for having a save mode that removes mipmaps.  It wouldn't just be about save - the loading would have to be modified also.

[DenisIv]

On 2/3/2017 at 12:41 PM, Irvin said:

 Hope the developers can do something about the file size and other things holding back a product with great promise.

This is my story.
I have recently begin to test AP.  So, my initial file was OLYMPUS ORF RAW size 16.8 Mb.  I made few corrections with using masks, filters etc.  Saved the file and got 588 Mb. Ohhhh!
I went back, deleted all the layers but the single one, saved again. Still 588 Mb. Ok, I am opening again, clicking the layer and choosing  [Rasterize...] from drop down menu and.... Oh! Now it is 656 Mb!!! Just can't believe it!
Exported as TIFF 16bit and got quite reasonable 36.1 Mb.
This is not good. Not good at all: [File open]  -  [Document flatten]  -  [Save] ...- ... 724 Mb!!!!

I am a bit in panic! If I continue to do ANYTHING with the file it will grow like hell!
But wait! I have got 2 snapshots (one made by the system and one by me) in the file! Maybe?!..
Oh, this is not a simple task - you have to go [View] - [Studio] -[Snapshots] and from there you can delete.

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
Now it is "only"  68Mb. Flat file with only one raster image inside.
IMHO this is mad - such a nice product with such a crazy "file size" feature.
Le monde n'est pas juste...

[DenisIv]

So, I did some feather investigations.

I converted the RAW file with ARC to DNG, opened it in PS C2 and did some edits like I did in AP, including 3 snapshots, masks, 3 copy of background layer.
And now my 8 bit PSD is 96Mb and 16 bit PSD is 140.  That's it.