The space hunger is a big Problem - problem in resource management

[HugoIII]

Actually I work on a catalogue for an art exhibition with round about 200 pages. For this type of catalogue it is very important to get the best visual quality in the photos. 

I became the photos from the photographers as 50mpix .tifs at round about 270mb each and 26mpix at 140mb. To keep the possibilities of cropping inside Publisher I use the full source images (and this is kind of my workflow).

the last days I had the feeling of a very very slow System not just affinity. Ich checkt everything and saw that I run out of hard disk space on my system SSD. I made a few tests and found out that the opening of the publisher file with all photos linked takes up round about 42GB of my SSD space. And I just finished a quarter of the catalogue with the original source files. I think in this way I cannot finish the work because my whole System has just 512GB of System SSD (thanks to apple for their policies). 

Maybe for the future hopefully near a kind of preview rendering inside publisher should be great - In this case It renders one time a preview in a "preview mode" and do not need to keep the whole Database behind it. At the moment It feels like I embedded the photos because I put them specially on an external drive to keep my space (to keep the system workable - I think you know that free hard disk space is very very important for an stable and fast macOS) free but all the data transferred into a "cachelike" data package on my System hard drive. This is a big big Problem for high quality photo Catalogues because also in the end format cropped stage the Photos sometimes are big in file size and a photo catalogue / book in a professional context with up to 300 pages is not unusual.

Is there any solution, any workaround without losing the cropping capacities and without quality looses?

Are there any plans of improving this kind of space hungriness?

bye the way - thanks for the great tool itself!

[carl123]

32 minutes ago, HugoIII said:

Is there any solution, any workaround without losing the cropping capacities and without quality looses?

Split the 200 page document into 4 x 50 page documents

Once the catalogue is complete, take some sedatives, put on a pair of diapers and try to merge all 4 documents into one master one

 

[Grotesker]

I'm sorry, but if you are going to work in this way, you need a much bigger hard drive (external usb SSD might just help) and probably a more powerful computer. My work around would be to design your pages with placeholders or low-res images then resize your images to sensible sizes and link them when you're done. Unless your page size is huge and/or it is going to be printed by some new super-quality method, the images need to be at the very highest 600dpi. Using the full scale images will never work if they're over 250Mb each. I speak from experience having attempted books own low-end systems in the past, just a recipe for frustration!

[HugoIII]

3 minutes ago, Grotesker said:

I'm sorry, but if you are going to work in this way, you need a much bigger hard drive (external usb SSD might just help) and probably a more powerful computer. My work around would be to design your pages with placeholders or low-res images then resize your images to sensible sizes and link them when you're done. Unless your page size is huge and/or it is going to be printed by some new super-quality method, the images need to be at the very highest 600dpi. Using the full scale images will never work if they're over 250Mb each. I speak from experience having attempted books own low-end systems in the past, just a recipe for frustration!

The problem in this case is not the external hard drive -> Affinity transfer all the temp files to the internal SSD. I total understand your point and also agree with you with the hardware tools. But in this case it isn't any low end system... and the overall speed is great. The problem is that I have to work mobile sometimes and for me a twin system with two computers makes no sense because of the daily Data transfer to do etc... 
At the moment I do it with placeholder jpgs. and there is no problem with it. I think at the End I split the document and put the .tif data in the parts and then make the export.
But I think there should be a possibility of a software solution - because affinity already has algorythms to save pictures in other formats. And maybe this "part of lines" could find the way to publisher
 

Scenario:

You design a document  and place photos as linkes images. Your setting here is "draft" -> the drafts setting render every linked image maybe as a .jpg 80% (maybe full resolution)

If you want to check the color accurrancy in some points you set the view mode to "final quality - part wise" -> here the software renders the original data to the document but just in the Area your screen is shown.

If you want a complete final preview there should be a mode like "soft proof" -> here is all based on the original files and all is shown in the right color space (maybe here is also a possibility to simulate greys and also papercolor, etc.) 

This is may be a workflow with a slight better and faster resource management also without a 21.000 € mac pro

[HugoIII]

Hey Publisher Team,

@Patrick Connor

thanks for the silent work in the background on this problem. It is getting better beta for beta. Before with the 9.2 it needed a swap file of round about 65 GB. Now it is round about 800Mb (while short working with the same file).

Thanks!