Excessively Large File Size

[matt.r]

I have created a new document with four text boxes, one rectangle, and seven placed JPEGs across two artboards. Each of the placed images was no larger than 2 MB (maximum total of 2*7=14 MB). However, the surprising thing is that my .afdesign file is 141 MB. I have turned off "Save thumbnails with documents" and "Save history with document." Is there any way to reduce this, or is this an Affinity Designer bug? 141 MB is prohibitively large for the simple document.

I have noticed that rasterizing each image in place @300ppi resolves this, reducing the file to 7 MB. However, I lose the ability to scale those images for print within the same document in the future.

I'm guessing that Affinity is storing the bytes on disk as an uncompressed GPU textures. If that's the case, I would prefer to embed my original JPEG in the Affinity file even at the cost of reduced performance when opening the document.

I'm using Affinity Designer v1.6.5.135 on Windows. I can provide the sample document if needed, but this should be easy to reproduce with any images

[R C-R]

The large size of native format Affinity files is a frequent topic in these forums. See for example the comments in this one for an explanation of why they are so large.

[matt.r]

Thanks for linking to a relevant thread, I wasn't able to come up with the right search terms before.

Since it seems that this is intentional, I would like the Affinity team to understand that it's not inconsequential. Of course it results in wasted space when archiving projects, but my primary issue is that it makes sharing these documents over Dropbox and even LAN in some cases unnecessarily difficult. Sharing a simple design file over the internet has gone from tolerable to almost impossible on my measly 1 mbit down/750 kbit up connection.