Manage Designer file sizes - pixel layer sizes

[Ecifircas]

Hey,

 

I am fairly new to Designer and I never worked with illustrator. I've been working on some drawings with multiple artboards. I've put in several images (backgrounds, textures, etc) into vector drawings. Now I've noticed the file is 650 MB. Could anyone give some ideas to keep the file size under control?

 

- Are images maintained within the document at full resolution, even when shrunken to a tiny size, or do they get compressed? So should I compress them before adding them into designer?

- Is there a way to clean out a designer file? For instance to see which pixel layers are heaviest?

- How to work with embedded file versus standard layer? What's really the difference?

- How to work with multiple instances of same clipped images (textures)?

 

How do you guys manage this? 

 

Thanks!

[v_kyr]

1 hour ago, Ecifircas said:

- Are images maintained within the document at full resolution, even when shrunken to a tiny size, or do they get compressed? So should I compress them before adding them into designer?

Images you place onto the document (by drag/drop, place etc.) do usually have internally the size of the initial orig image file, no matter if you resize/transform it to tiny one or not here. Further the Affinity file format itself uses also compression when storing it files. In order to get smaller file sizes you have to keep track of what image sizes you import here, meaning if you just need in your document tiny image sizes of let's say some stars or the like etc. don't import/place highres images of these then. Size them down before import/place to keep their file size smaller or use some compression which still fulfills your needs.

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- Is there a way to clean out a designer file? For instance to see which pixel layers are heaviest?

AFAIK there is no such indicator which would show you how many bytes a certain layer may occupy or which portion of your document takes the most internal space/size here.

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- How to work with embedded file versus standard layer? What's really the difference?

An embedded file can contain an entire document -not just images-, thus also shapes, text, layers etc depending on the type of your embedded source. So it can contain more than just one layer and also keeps to be in sync (updates accordingly) when altered.

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- How to work with multiple instances of same clipped images (textures)?

It depends, if you want to have those objects synchronized (update together accordingly) or not etc. If you want to update all of them at once add them as a symbol which you can reuse multiple times, use the Symbol panel. - If they are just clippsed image textures those style you want to reuse or assign to various objects on demand, then set them up as a Style in the styles panel. If they are objects you need often over and over, then set them up as custom assets via the assets panel.

[Ecifircas]

Thanks, that's helpful.

[Ecifircas]

I have been trying to work with your suggestions and I have seriously reduced the file size. I have rebuilt the file with all images now compressed. Where the original file was 650MB, the new file is now 140 MB. This is much better but nevertheless seems still too large, considering all the imported images were smaller than 500kb.

 

So I just did a test adding 3 images of a combined total size of about 1 MB. The resulting AD file is over 17 MB. Is it normal AD will increase the size of pixel layers by almost 20-fold? I've attached the files used.

TEST_FILE_SIZE2.afdesign

[Ecifircas]

Anyone?