Large Image Sizes When Dragging from Browser

[eduardotanco]

The error:

When I drag an image into Affinity Designer from my browser, the image size is 31MB. If I drag the same image from my desktop, it’s only 800KB.

The problem is that when importing multiple images into a document by dragging them from the browser, the document size grows very large very quickly.

To reproduce the error:

1. Open a document (in my case A4 sRGB)
2. Drag an image in.

Attached is a sample video demonstrating the issue, along with the document and image used.

Thank you in advance for your help and great products!

Affinity Designer 2.6.2 / Mac mini M4 Pro 24gb RAM Mac OS 15.4.1

 

 

Image_syze_test.afdesign

[loukash]

As far as I can tell, this looks to me more like a MacOS "feature" ("scare quotes" are intentional), rather than an "Affinity bug". 

For example, Swift Publisher behaves exactly the same, converting a drag'n'dropped image from a browser window into "import.tiff", whereas a locally saved image will be imported in the original format when drag'n'dropped from the Finder. (Swift Publisher uses a package document format, so all imported elements are visible in Finder when inspecting the package content.)

This is quite typical for many MacOS workflows, where apparently either the OS or the respective app attempts to avoid any degradation of files with lossy compression through an "on-the-fly upgrade" to a lossless format. Same scenario often happens with audio files in audio apps on Mac as well, where on certain conditions e.g. an MP3 file is being "upgraded" to AIFF or WAV on import, for example.

There's also a "3rd workflow", where you can copy the image in the browser window to the clipboard first.
Pasting it into Affinity will place a PNG for a change, which is still significantly smaller than the uncompressed TIFF.
Interestingly though, Swift Publisher will paste it as a TIFF again.

So perhaps an app has some control how to handle imported or placed files? I don't know, just observing the facts…  

[eduardotanco]

Hi Loukash,

Thanks for the reply and your time!

It's good to know that Affinity isn't the only app behaving this way. However, in my case, when I copy and paste an image (to the clipboard) and then paste it into Designer, it pastes as a TIFF instead of JPEG or PNG.

I would still like to know from the Affinity team if this is expected behavior or if they can fix it, as it's quite inconvenient.

Thanks again!

[eduardotanco]

After doing some additional testing, I’ve discovered the following:

When dragging the image into Adobe Illustrator, Illustrator generates a 1.2 MB file instead of the 32 MB file that Designer creates, so I rule out this being a common issue across all programs in MAC OS.

Additionally, something quite strange happens:

When opening the Illustrator document in Designer and checking the image size inside, Designer reports it as 56 MB, even though the Illustrator file is only 1.2 MB — STRANGE.

When saving that Illustrator file (opened in Designer) as a Designer file, the final size is 1.8 MB, despite Designer stating that the image within the file weighs 56 MB.

I’ve attached a video and the files I used:

What I expect from Designer:

• That dragging files in results in reasonable file sizes

• That it accurately reports the real size of the files within the document

Thank you for your help!

Test_Img.ai Test_IMG_2.afdesign

[Oufti]

51 minutes ago, eduardotanco said:

When opening the Illustrator document in Designer and checking the image size inside, Designer reports it as 56 MB, even though the Illustrator file is only 1.2 MB — STRANGE.

When saving that Illustrator file (opened in Designer) as a Designer file, the final size is 1.8 MB, despite Designer stating that the image within the file weighs 56 MB.

Most probably, the .ai file contains a TIFF image that is compressed. The size you see in the Resource Manager is the uncompressed size, but when you save it, it's recompressed. 

[eduardotanco]

Hi again and thanks for your time,

I've been doing some research and it seems that apps do have some control over the format in which images are pasted from the clipboard, as I mentioned by @loukash.

Could someone from Serif confirm this? 

I really have an issue with this since I do moodboards in designer and drag hundreds of images in to the program and the resulting file sizes are huge

Thanks everybody again!

[NathanC]

Hi @eduardotanco,

I've just tested this on Windows for comparison and the conversion to TIFF isn't happening when dragging from a browser, so at the very least this is MacOS specific. I've replicated and logged this with the developers for further investigation and review.