Why is afphoto file so massive when saved?

[Nilla's Photography]

Hi,

My original scanned jpg file is 38.7MB and when exported (Bicubic and at 90% Quality) the file reduces to 26MB. However, my Affinity Photo file saves as a massive 561.5MB. How can I reduce this file and still retain my edits in AF?

(I'm on a MACBook Air with 2TB Seagate external drive)

Many thanks

Edit:

Just uploaded my Preferences, maybe there's something here that I can set to reduce the afphoto file when saved? I'd like to save my edits but not in such a massive file.

[carl123]

You're gonna need a bigger drive

[DWright]

What adjustments have you applied to the photo as these will increase the size of the afphoto file compared to the original flattened jpg file

[Nilla's Photography]

Hi,

Contrast, clarity, High pass, cropping - I don't like post-production so do minimal.

It's the afphoto file that's massive, from 38.8MB to 561.5MB, not the exported jpg.

[gdenby]

Here's a guess. AP saves .jpg at 100%. Often, that bumps the file size by at least 30% over a 90% compression. I have to suppose that each adjustment layer is an bitmap of a similar size or bigger , because it may set aside space for selections within the adjustments. 

[R C-R]

The native Affinity file format is designed for in-app responsiveness, not size. This includes things like storing pre-calculated mipmaps, relying on serialized data structures, optionally storing many history steps & snapshots for instantly restoring a file or part of it to a former state, & so on. Some file data is compressed, but this is done using lossless compression algorithms that are not as efficient at saving file space as the lossy kind used in JPEGs.

In addition to that, JPEGs store everything in a single 'flat' rasterized layer at 8 bit color resolution, while the native format can support hundreds of various kinds of layers at much higher color resolutions (up to 32 bit, depending on color model) which can increase file sizes exponentially.

[Nilla's Photography]

Thanks for the suggestion @gdenby, but at 30% greater of my original jpg file this would only be around 50MB - this aphoto file for the original jpg saved as 561.5MB!

Thanks for the explanation @R C-R although I think that something has changed in my settings - perhaps after an upgrade? I don't remember changing anything. Reason I say this is that my afphoto files of April last year were only around 15-20MB for an original jpg of 7-10MB. But now, the files are massive. 

As I mentioned, I don't do a lot of PP and previous to buying AF, I used PS Elements as this covered everything I needed. I did not have this issue using Elements.

Perhaps I shouldn't save the afphoto file as at this rate I'm going to be using up my 2TB external drive in no time at all.

Is there anything in my Preferences dialogue box above that could be pushing the file size out?

Thanks again for your help.

[R C-R]

5 minutes ago, Nilla's Photography said:

Is there anything in my Preferences dialogue box above that could be pushing the file size out?

One thing to check is the Document > Color Format setting. If you are working in the RGB color space & it is not set to "RGB (8 bit)" try changing it to that. The higher bit depth setting require larger files to make room to store the much greater range of colors those formats allow. (See for example this tutorial on bit depth for more about that.)

Also make sure File > Save History With Document is not checked, because saving the history can increase file size dramatically, as can saving a lot of snapshots in the document.  

[Nilla's Photography]

• Color Format is set to RGB (8bit)
• I've never used the 'Save History With Document' option, just use the 'Save As' option.
• Opened a couple of afphoto files and there isn't any history, although Layers are there.

Is there another setting somewhere that saves the history?

Many thanks for your help.

[R C-R]

5 minutes ago, Nilla's Photography said:

Is there another setting somewhere that saves the history?

No, to the best of my knowledge only File > Save History With Document controls that.

It might help if we knew the document pixel dimensions & had an idea of how much fine detail it includes after you made your edits, particularly clarity. If the dimensions are very large & a lot of fine detail was added compared to the JPEG original, it might account for the huge change in file size, although I doubt that alone would explain it.

[Nilla's Photography]

Size: 7953x10729px

No history saved, but layers are still saved, so double-clicking these:

• Live high pass: Radius 11.3px, Monochrome, Linear Light
• Contrast: 25%
• Unsharp Mask: Radius 0 (strange as I usually set this to 1px), Factor 0.624

I have another file that's blown out to 1.4GB (in Finder) but this one keeps crashing and when opened in recovery mode, won't allow a "Save" or "Save As" displaying: "Save failed as access to the document was lost" message displays.

I've compared a couple last year's afphoto files to the ones I've been working on the last few days and you are correct, last years are saved in RGB (8 Bit) but this years are saved with RGB (16 BIT). Can this be a reason for the dramatic change of file size?

[R C-R]

1 minute ago, Nilla's Photography said:

last years are saved in RGB (8 Bit) but this years are saved with RGB (16 BIT). Can this be a reason for the dramatic change of file size?

Some but not all of it. It might also have something to do with the 7953 x 10729 px size, but only if your edits have added a lot of fine grained color variations that are hard to compress. If you zoom far into the image, do you see anything like that?

[Nilla's Photography]

These photos are B&W plus one Sepia toned as I scanned these from photos, not negatives, so not sure how to check this?

Just to add to my last comment and on further testing of several afphoto files:

• When saving with RGB (16 Bit) color format, I have no problems saving the file, it's just a massive file.
• When I've gone into that same RGB (16 Bit) file that I had no problems saving and changed the color format to RGB (8 Bit) so as to reduce the file size, I am unable to save the file as the "Save failed as access to the document was lost" message displays.

I'm using the same laptop and external drive for both files, so it's not the external drive as in another AF forum discussion. Could it be that AF's RGB (8 Bit) option has a bug? Think this is a different issue though.

[IanSG]

Something I've noticed in the past is that AP doesn't release disk space - if you open an afphoto file, delete all the changes and then save it to the original file, the file size remains unchanged.  Could your increased file sizes be the result of some previous changes that you've since discarded?

[Nilla's Photography]

Hi @IanSG, not in these cases as they are new files I've saved to work in from scratch.

These are jpgs I'm working with at the moment not RAW files. So, typically: Import the jpg>'Save as' to an afphoto file>make edits (minimal as above)>Export to new jpg>Close and save afphoto file.

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, Nilla's Photography said:

These photos are B&W plus one Sepia toned as I scanned these from photos, not negatives, so not sure how to check this?

What I meant was to zoom in on some area that seems to be of a solid color until you could begin to see individual pixels at the edges of nearby color transitions & look for subtle color variations, doing this in the app after your edits have been applied.

However, the "Save failed as access to the document was lost" message implies there is something else causing this, something wrong in the app or possibly in the file system of the external drive. I suggest running Disk Utility's 'First Aid' on the external drive (& maybe the internal one too) to see if that turns up anything odd, & then resetting the app if it does not.

[walt.farrell]

2 hours ago, Nilla's Photography said:

I'm using the same laptop and external drive for both files, so it's not the external drive as in another AF forum discussion

It still may be that problem. To confirm you would need to move the file to a local drive and do your work from there.

The Affinity team recommends not editing from an external drive, I believe.

[Oval]

On 24. Juni 2018 at 3:56 PM, Nilla's Photography said:

However, my Affinity Photo file saves as a massive 561.5MB

Test: If you save your opened AP files again with a different name, do you get smaller sizes than those of the original AP files?

[R C-R]

5 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

It still may be that problem. To confirm you would need to move the file to a local drive and do your work from there.

The Affinity team recommends not editing from an external drive, I believe.

FWIW, from this post by @MEB

Quote

We do not recommend editing files directly from external drives/cards/NAS (network drives/storage) and cloud synchronised folders as this may lead to lost of work/data due to loss of connection or files changes (in synchronised folders). Affinity apps don't load the whole file to memory for performance reasons and require a permanent connection/access to the file to ensure incremental saves/changes work properly.

 

[Nilla's Photography]

Thanks all, for your help!

This is what happened last night:

@Oval- tested with a different name and it saved as exactly the same file size.

@IanSG - not sure about this one, maybe

@R C-R - So the problem is that as the file didn't save correctly but still is 1.4GB, when I open it from my external drive, it asks to open a recovery file, then doesn't allow me to save or rename then save, etc. But when I try to save the recovery file with a different name, I get the "Save failed as access to the document was lost" message. When I copy the file from external drive to local and open it, although it's still 1.4GB, the image reverts to the original without any changes (as present in the recovery file) - this is bizarre. I would have thought if it was the original file, then it should be a much smaller size? Also, I zoomed in and can't really see a lot of colour variations as you mentioned. 

 

This is today's update:

I was able to open the recovery document (1.4GB file) from my external drive then rename and save it successfully back to the external drive. The file is now 274.4MB. Perhaps as @IanSG suggested that AF hangs onto disk space somehow and it's not until you close down your machine completely that this is released? Although no longer saved at 1.4GB and has reduced to 274.4MB - still a large file.

Other questions/suggestion:

1. I ran First Aid on my laptop and external drive, both are OK.
2. By resetting the app, do you mean uninstalling/reinstalling?
3. Is there a temp file that I can salvage the recovery file from?
4. Is it best just to export the jpg and not save the source Afphoto file? At this rate, I'm going to run out of external drive space.
5. As more and more users work from external drives or devices without a lot of storage, it would be great if AF could adapt the application to users' requirements. It's a pain continually moving files from external drive, to local drive, back to external all the time.

[IanSG]

49 minutes ago, Nilla's Photography said:

@Oval- tested with a different name and it saved as exactly the same file size.

 

50 minutes ago, Nilla's Photography said:

I was able to open the recovery document (1.4GB file) from my external drive then rename and save it successfully back to the external drive. The file is now 274.4MB.

I'm confused!  Are you saying that a large but otherwise OK file saved at the same file size, while a large file that had to be recovered saved as a smaller file?

 

54 minutes ago, Nilla's Photography said:

Perhaps as @IanSG suggested that AF hangs onto disk space somehow and it's not until you close down your machine completely that this is released?

That's not what I was thinking of - it's more the case that once blocks have been allocated to a file they're not released, even though the file no longer needs to store so  much data.  Once the file's closed AP has no further involvement.  The same may not be true of the OS though - there may be some caching involved.  As I understand it, that's why Serif "don't recommend" (not the same as "doesn't work") external / network drives - the file management is no longer under the control of the program.  FWIW I've used AP to edit files on an external USB 3 drive with no problems at all.

 

58 minutes ago, Nilla's Photography said:

Other questions/suggestion:

1. I ran First Aid on my laptop and external drive, both are OK.
2. By resetting the app, do you mean uninstalling/reinstalling?

2.  If you start the app with the  <ctrl> key depressed you get the option to reset.  It's effective at clearing "glitches" but you'll lose any customisations you've made.

[carl123]

1 hour ago, Nilla's Photography said:

Is it best just to export the jpg and not save the source Afphoto file? At this rate, I'm going to run out of external drive space. 

That would kind of defeat having all the benefits of Affinity Photo, it's nice to go back into an Afphoto file at a later date to see how you achieved an effect on a particular image if you want to recreate it again.

If you could upload and provide a dropbox link to the original 560MB file it may be possible to someone to reverse engineer your adjustments to see when the file balloons to what we would normally expect to see.

If you want to keep the file private raise a ticket at AffinitySupport@serif.com  and give them the dropbox link.  You really do some sort of answer as to why this file got so big, if only so you can plan for it in the future

[Oval]

Nilla's Photography, what could reproduce and find the reason of the problem quickly: Just use a small original photo and do the same like with the normal (big) ones. If you have similar problems (too huge files), you should check hardware (cables, …) and software.

[R C-R]

As I understand it (which might not be correct in all the particulars), the recovery file just contains the serialized changes made to the document since the last save. This means it is useless without the saved version. It's purpose is to allow the recovery of those changes when they could not be saved back to the file, like if the app crashes or something else prevents that. If the document can be saved, or is closed without saving the changes, then the recovery file is deleted -- otherwise, the drive would fill up with recovery files for every document. For the same reason, if the user declines to recover the unsaved changes, the file is also deleted -- it is a 'one time' offer, so to speak.

Recovery files are saved locally on a per user basis (for example, for Affinity Photo at path ~/Library/Containers/com.seriflabs.affinityphoto/Data/Library/Application Support/autosave/), with unique numeric filenames like 20135626064102.autosave. I assume these filenames are used to link documents to their respective recovery files.

This would explain why the file copied to the local drive does not include the changes & is still oversized -- it is just a copy of the version last saved on the external drive & there probably is no link to the recovery file (assuming there still is one) because as far as the app is concerned this is a new document saved to a different location.

This also is likely part of the reason why they do not recommend editing from an external drive -- even if the connection is not lost, there is no guarantee an autosave file on the local drive will be linked to it.

[Nilla's Photography]

 

@IanSG - Sorry for the confusion I mentioned 2 different files in this support ticket. The 1.4GB file was not OK as each time I tried to save this it crashed and displayed the "Saved failed..." message.  However, after closing my machine down, the following day I was able to open the 1.4GB file, then rename and save this file successfully, but during this process, the file saved as 274.4MB (not the blown out 1.4GB).

Thanks for the reset tip.

@carl123 - My point exactly as I like to keep the AF source files, especially if I have to go in and resize for a particular print size, which could then result in further minor tweaks. I've done much research online and the consensus is that continually opening and editing within the same jpg reduces the jpgs quality each time. So it's best to go back into a source file and make changes there then re-export as a new jpg. Not all my images are RAW files.

After closing my machine down I since opened and re-saved the 560MB file with a different name and it saved again successfully, but reduced to 260.2MB. Maybe AF does hang on to data in the background and I need to close machine completely when issues occur.

@Oval Thanks for suggestion and will have to try this test.

@R C-R That makes a lot of sense and thank you for the in-depth explanation!

 

Many thanks to everyone that helped - great support!