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Why are *.afphoto files so large?


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As a amateur photographer, I am really happy with Affinity photo to do some basic photo processing. I like to save my affinity project file to check on edits I made in the future.

One thing I have noticed, though, is that the *.afphoto file is very big in comparison to the photo. When I develop a RAW image of e.g. 15MB, do some simple processing and save it, the *.afphoto file is 323MB. After processing a few photos this quickly fills up my storage space.

Is it really needed to have such large *.afphoto files? Is there some setting to reduce this?

 

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This is evergreen, try search forum.

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I loaded some PS Elements 12 files and saved them as aphoto and these were a bit smaller. The compression alogorithm seems to be a bit more efficient. :)

Windows 10 Pro x64 (1903). Intel Core i7-9700K @ 3.60GHz, 32 GB memory, NVidia RTX 2080
Affinity Photo 1.7.2.471, Affinity Designer 1.7.2.471, Affinity Publisher 1.7.2.471

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 Thanks stokerg for pointing me to this thread, it's an interesting read.

But still it does not answer the question why the file is 20x as large as the original picture. I understand that it will definitely be larger than the original due to lossless saving and other saved settings, but this much more surprised me alot. How can it be explained?

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2 minutes ago, Ferryy said:

 Thanks stokerg for pointing me to this thread, it's an interesting read.

But still it does not answer the question why the file is 20x as large as the original picture. I understand that it will definitely be larger than the original due to lossless saving and other saved settings, but this much more surprised me alot. How can it be explained?

The original image is a not a Bitmap. RAW contains sensor data and a tiny thumbnail for preview. So you can't really compare that.

Save it as a TIF or an PSD file. How big is that?

My CR2 are about 20 MB and the resulting PSD usually somewhere at 120 MB for about 16 MP.

What is your situation?

Windows 10 Pro x64 (1903). Intel Core i7-9700K @ 3.60GHz, 32 GB memory, NVidia RTX 2080
Affinity Photo 1.7.2.471, Affinity Designer 1.7.2.471, Affinity Publisher 1.7.2.471

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22 hours ago, Ferryy said:

But still it does not answer the question why the file is 20x as large as the original picture. I understand that it will definitely be larger than the original due to lossless saving and other saved settings, but this much more surprised me alot. How can it be explained?

Part of the explanation has to do with how .afphoto files are structured & accessed by Affinity apps. Basically, the native file structure makes it possible to very quickly load only whatever the app needs from the file to enable displaying or editing it, & also to very quickly save any changes made to it without having to rewrite the entire file every time it is saved.

In this respect, it is sort of like a database file, optimized for random rather than sequential access to various parts of the file's content.

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Thanks for the link, @stokerg.

First I was thinking the growing APUB file was a bug, but after reading the explaination I think the file format is smart.

I use Ctrl-S all the time and compared to "Save as" it's really fast. Now I know why. :)

From now on I will do a "Save as" as the last step to get a minimal file size for archival.

Windows 10 Pro x64 (1903). Intel Core i7-9700K @ 3.60GHz, 32 GB memory, NVidia RTX 2080
Affinity Photo 1.7.2.471, Affinity Designer 1.7.2.471, Affinity Publisher 1.7.2.471

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I did went through that as files were in the 300-400 mb size.

there’s some other thread about it and I ended up with this.

copy/paste make it look like I’m screaming the words, sorry for that =)

This is typically because developed raw images are processed to 16-bit - it offers more precision but increases file size exponentially. Before you save your .afphoto file, you might try the following:

 

Go to Document > Colour Format > RGB (8 bit) to convert the image to 8-bit and save file space.

Go to View > Studio > Snapshots to bring up the snapshots panel. You should see an initial "Background" snapshot. Delete this as it's essentially a backup copy of your image that takes up file size space.

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