Affinity Photo Save File Size

[ATripathi]

Hello everyone,

I have become big fan of AP and I think this is a perfect software for photographers on budget with great features and flexibility. I only recently started using AP (actually only recently started photography altogether). My workflow is probably not the best but it is what I have settled on. I do raw processing on a different software and then use AP on the exported tif file. I was really excited about the linked file feature mainly due to the potential of decreasing the file sizes of afphoto .

I tried with a tif file and few simple curves and still the file size was 215 MB or so. Just to test, I deleted every image layer and just left the curve layers and the file size actually increased. I removed even the curve layers and saved a empty file which ended up being roughly 200 MB. I am not sure what is being saved when there is no layer to save such that the file size ended up this large. Am I missing nay settings (Save history is not enabled).

Thank you for your help.

[ATripathi]

An Update -

Tried identical process except started with a blank canvas (exact same size, same DPI and color profile). Save size - 7 KB

Added linked image (same as above) - < 1 MB

Similar processing - curves with masks and such. Final afphoto file size : ~20 MB. This makes a lot more sense to me.

[Dan C]

Hi @ATripathi,

Welcome to the Affinity forums and my sincerest apologies for the delayed response here!

On 2/7/2021 at 12:17 PM, ATripathi said:

tried with a tif file and few simple curves and still the file size was 215 MB or so. Just to test, I deleted every image layer and just left the curve layers and the file size actually increased. I removed even the curve layers and saved a empty file which ended up being roughly 200 MB.

That's certainly strange behaviour, Affinity has a process whereby we don't discard data from a file until it has changed a 'significant' amount, I believe the delta is around 25% before this kicks in and removes the old data from the file. However with your description of the layers removed from the file I would have expected this to have kicked in and 'streamlined' the file.

If you still have a copy of this file, would you mind opening it and performing a 'Save As' and letting me know if the newly saved file is closer to the expected file size?

On 2/7/2021 at 1:07 PM, ATripathi said:

Tried identical process except started with a blank canvas (exact same size, same DPI and color profile). Save size - 7 KB

Added linked image (same as above) - < 1 MB

Similar processing - curves with masks and such. Final afphoto file size : ~20 MB. This makes a lot more sense to me.

This certainly sounds like much more reasonable behaviour, I can only assume that the application did not correctly detect enough of a 'change' in your previous file to discard the unnecessary data. As this isn't something I've had reported previously, I am confident it should not happen again - but please do let us know if you have any further issues here

[lepr]

On 2/7/2021 at 12:17 PM, ATripathi said:

tried with a tif file and few simple curves and still the file size was 215 MB or so. Just to test, I deleted every image layer and just left the curve layers and the file size actually increased. I removed even the curve layers and saved a empty file which ended up being roughly 200 MB

That sounds normal. When Affinity opens (not imports/places) a TIFF or other image file, a new Affinity document is initialised with a Pixel object named "Background" generated from the image, and it stores a snapshot (also named "Background") of that initial state in the document. Deleting the Pixel object does not delete the snapshot, but you can use the Snapshots panel to do that.