AP .afphoto file size large

[pb2016]

I'm unsure whether to post this as a bug or a feature request. If it's in the wrong place, moderators please move as needed.

 

I mostly process Nikon D7200 RAW images. The image files mostly are between 27MB and 34MB.

 

I notice that in AP 1.5.0.45, as in the betas before, a saved .afphoto project file is about 154MB, or about five times the original .nef raw image file.

 

On the plus side I notice that adding snapshots and using 32-bit RGB color do not increase the size of the afphoto file.

 

On the negative side, that's a big file. By comparison, Adobe Lightroom (which I am trying to get away from) just creates the very small .xmp file along with the original raw image file. (With Lightroom I do not routinely convert to DNG.) So the overhead added storage per image is frequently less than 10KB and almost always less than 100KB.

 

I understand that AP stores a bitmap in the afphoto project file and assume this causes a lot of the large file size.

 

Nonetheless, that is a large pill to swallow. If I have, say, 250 images to edit from a trip this creates a lot of extra hard drive space. And at the moment I have about 11,000 images total in my Lightroom catalog. Adding 154MB per image is a lot.

 

Is the file size as expected from a design perspective? If not, can it be fixed? If it is as designed, is there any hope of somehow using the original raw file rather than a bitmap, not incorporating a bitmap in the project file, and reducing the added storage per image to, say, 10MB?

 

Thanks,

Pete