Affinity Designer Large File Size

[dpwhittaker]

I recently developed a cover for a proposal using Affinity Designer for the first time.  After exporting the file in both PDF and JPG formats, I thought everything was fine.  But when I saw the size of the .afdesign source file, I was very surprised.  The sum total size of the placed images is 42.7M, but the AD source file is 173M--a little over a 400% increase in size!.  I looked through the forum and tried several of the recommendations I found, but none of them worked.  Besides the file size, I realized that AD does not "link" to the files (like Illustrator) but instead actually inserts the images into the AD file.  Do you have any recommendations for reducing the file sizes, and do you think you will add a "link" function in the futures?

 

Thank you!

[MEB]

Hi dpwhittaker,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

There's a few things that may increase the file size considerably: using bitmap fills, Save History With Document enabled (on the File menu), embedded files etc. I'm not sure if there's anything specific you can do to reduce their size. Linked files will be added in a future update.

[dpwhittaker]

Thanks for the quick reply.  I checked the Save History with Document feature and it is not currently on.  I'll adapt for now and try to use smaller images.  I experienced the same thing several years ago when I was using Freehand.  If images overlapped each other with transparency, the file size became huge.  When links become available, they will probably help reduce this problem.

 

Cheers!

[JasonOnDesign]

I have a similar problem. I have some files which *should be* fairly small but they're 90 megs each. I went in and deleted many layers and saved and the file size didn't go down at all. Suggestions?

 

[carl123]

First make sure your are not saving the history with the file, then do a file save as (to a new file name) which apparently streamlines the file - removing any incremental updates that the file contains

 

Let us know if that improves things

[R C-R]

For me, using "Save as" rarely makes an appreciable difference in file size, but what often does is just turning off the visibility of some layers, particularly in Affinity Designer documents that have layers with lots of nodes or transparency. My guess is this affects how many mipmaps are saved in the file, but that is only a guess.