Enormous Preview file size

In a vain attempt to get LR fast enough to use for work, I have just added a 1TB swap drive to the computer used just for LR previews/catalogue.
Looks like it won't be anywhere near big enough.
I just rendered photographs from 13 weeks work and after 3 days of tediously rendering 1:1 previews, the drive is half full! They were 13 extremely busy weeks but still, that's a bit absurd considering the files being previewed are only 853G compared to 488G of previews and a significant percentage will be JPEGs and I shot RAW + JPEg much of the time, which unlike RAW files need no complex rendering to be displayed. There's a similar problem with Bridge where your preview cache files can be even bigger than the files being cached. Now making a JPEG preview to represent a JPEG file seems a bit redundant to me which is Bridge's dumb solution. Not sure what LR does exactly as Preview cache uses a file only LR can handle.

Pete Marshall wrote:
You seem to be confusing two different things here; the LR previews folder and the RAW cache. The RAW cache in LR is only used in the develop mode and not for building the library previews. You can use the same folder and drive for the RAW cache as Bridge. The cached files are deleted as the cache becomes full.
The preview folder builds and stores previews according to the settings made in LR preferences. All files require a preview file for you to view them, irrespective of the presence of a jpg sidecar file with the RAW file. These are stored in a folder that by default is stored next to the catalog. This can be moved to other locations, which can speed things up. The technique to do this is described in the FAQ and on multiply drive based systems speeds things up a bit.
If you wish to regenerate all the previews in the catalog you can choose to do this in LR by going to Library, Previews, discard previews and then repeating the process selecting generate 1:1 previews. Dependent upon the speed of your machine and the size of the catalog this will take some time, but even a catalog of 1000,000 files on a slowish machine should be able to do this overnight and not require several days as you are suggesting.
As others have illustrated nicely it does take a very long time to render files even with a 12core machine with 48Gig of Ram which is waaaay faster than most people have.
As for rendering a preview for a JPEG sidecar file, I'm talking about JPEGs that exist in their own right and bear no [developed] visuual connection to the connected RAW file or indeed any connnection as far as LR is concerned - these are not sidecar files, but separate files albeit ones shot at the same time or derivitives of either of the RAW or JPEG master. LR is set to treat JPEGs next to RAWs as separate images.
ACR cache is also on the LR only swap file drive and it takes 35-40secs to swap between snapshots in Dev module and then about 12-20secs once they've been cached. In LR3.3 it would take a now seeminly speedy, though still very annoying 7-8 secs to swap back and for. This was tested with only LR and OS running,
I shall try separating catalogue from previews to see if that helps. Didn't realise that could be done as that was one thought I had to speed LR processing up.
I should mention flicking through full screen or 1:1 images in library mode has benefited from the 1;1 pre-render process, but I do not think even a 3TB HD will be big enough for a fully previewed library once all my images are in LR if I render them all! Still not as fast as Bridge can be though.

Similar Messages

Preview & File Size for jpegs problem.Bloating bug?

When adding cover art to iTunes, I am checking the file sizes to be certain I have the smallest size possible to add to my new iPod 16G nano. When connected to the iTunes store and "Get Album Artwork" is selected, I have no way of knowing the size of the images that get installed, except for choosing a song, doing "Get Info/Artwork" then copying and pasting the image in the Artwork window into Preview. Often this Preview image will be identified as around 300+ K in the file size.
So here's the weird part. When I find an image I want, say 240x240 20k file size, I copy it and paste it into Preview and Save As. the Inspector identifies it as 240x240 and 20K in size. In Finder, the file size is identified correctly as 20k. I use this to replace the iTunes artwork that was 350k, by deleting the old image, and using "Add Artwork" in Get Info. The new, smaller image is added. After clicking OK and to check that all is well, I select the song, Get Info, copy the artwork then go to Preview and use "New From Clipboard". Using Inspector, the image is 240x240, but the file size will be huge - 300+K. If I save this copied image and use Finder to check the file size it will be 300+K.
What is going on?

Hello Jody,
Very probably, the final image is exported in the native format for Clipboard: which is, "pict." These pict files are invariably "huge" when compared to a jpeg of the same physical dimension but which is of 72 ppi resolution. In other words, pict files are like .tiff files: they normally are not compressed and consequently are much larger files.
So when you do a "New From Clipboard" - the next step should be "Save As" and then select JPEG as the desired image file format.

Preview file size explodes for JSTOR PDFs

I've discovered that when I use PREVIEW to open and then save PDFs downloaded from JSTOR (www.jstor.org), the file size explodes: from 500K to 8 MEGs, for example. This happens only with PREVIEW (though also with PDFPEN), but not with AdobeReader, and it only seems to happen with JSTOR PDFs. Has anyone else noticed this behaviour?

I think I may have figured it out. There is a preference option for "PDF" called "Respect Screen DPI for Scale". If I turn that off, the file size doesn't explode. That may be a new option, or just an option that got switched on in my transition to Leopard.
However... now that it's stopped happening, I can't make it start by switching that preference back on, so that makes me doubt whether it really is the culprit. So long as my file sizes aren't exploding I'm happy, but I would like to understand why it happens.

Adobe Reader 10.0.1 printing queue is enormous in file size

Whenever I print a PDF that's roughly 4KB in size, it shows up in my printer queue as roughly 30MB. It takes forever for it to print if it ever does. A bunch of the users at my company are experiencing the same thing. Depending on what printer it is sent to, the printer may not have enough memory in it to queue the print so the print job fails.
A small work around we found was to set it to, print as image. That reduces the file size small enough to print but is still quite larger than the normal file size.
Is there a way/setting to make these files print normally?
Other files on our PCs print just fine. It's something with Adobe Reader and PDFs.

I am having this same issue in my office. The printer will partially print the document and also spits out a page about the printer being out of memory. Selecting "Print as Image" is our only work around but this sends a large slow page to the printer.
This was not an issue with version 9.

Previews file size

my photo collection os 60gb. when I open the package for the Aperture library file, it shows previews as 140gb and thumbnails at 25gb. I reset the preferences to a smaller size. How do I delete all of teh preiews and reconstruct them to bring the size of this file down?

Select all the images in your library right click and select delete previews from the contexual menu
Once thats done nad after you changeed the preview preference right click again and select update previews (or generate previews, forget which menu item will show up)

How large should one preview file be?

Okay, so whenever I create a preview (by pressing enter) for 3 minutes of a 1080 by 1920 30FPS video, the preview file is 40 GB. 40. For three minutes of an HD video. Clearly something is wrong here, but I don't know what it is. What settings should be changed to lower the preview file size and also what is a decent preview file size for that type of video? I'm not sure how big a preview file should really be.

Please post a screenshot of the Sequence Settings dialog.

Preview increases pdf file size when saving

When I save a PDF journal article using Preview, it often increases the file size by 2x - 4x, regardless of whether I have added annotations. In the attached image, you can see I downloaded a journal article (2.3 MB), opened it in Preview, duplicated and saved it and the resulting copied file was 6.1 MB.
This is a problem because I it signifiantly increases the size of my synced reference library. It is worse with larger files (25 MB eBooks that increase to 80 MB).
Can anyone help me find a way to annotate a journal article and preserve the original file size? I have tried Adobe Reader (awful and buggy interface, but preserves the original size!), and several other PDF apps (e.g. Skim) seem to rely on Apple's PDF engine where the file results in a larger size as well. Using Quartz filters to reduce file size within Preview is not effective. I'm happy to purchase a program if it works well.

I have also experienced this issue. My PDF file of 300MB increased to over 900MB when I simply put one straight line annotation onto it. Effectively this made the PDF unusable since it is now very slow to open and it is too large to transfer onto my iPad. I've experienced this multiple times with a variety of PDF files, and so now simply avoid changing them in any way in Preview. I have written to Apple via apple.com/feedback and have talked to Apple store 'Geniuses' about this. Apparently it is a known issue, but there was no promise of a resolution. I love the way Preview opens quickly and displays files and also allows beautiful, smooth scrolling of PDFs. It's a pity that there's this enormous problem with annotating. If anyone knows of a solution, it would be great to hear. I've tried other PDF programmes such as Adobe for Mac, but wasn't too impressed.

A simple and free way of reducing PDF file size using Preview

Note: this is a copy and update of a 5 year old discussion in the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard discussions which you can find here: https://discussions.apple.com/message/6109398#6109398
This is a simple and free solution I found to reduce the file size of PDFs in OS X, without the high cost and awful UI of Acrobat Pro, and with acceptable quality. I still use it every day, although I have Acrobat Pro as part of Adove Creative Cloud subscription.
Since quite a few people have found it useful and keep asking questions about the download location and destination of the filters, which have changed since 2007, I decided to write this update, and put it in this more current forum.
Here is how to install it:
Download the filters here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/41548940/PDF%20compression%20filters%20%28Un zip%20and%20put%20in%20your%20Library%20folder%29.zip
Unzip the downloaded file and copy the filters in the appropriate location (see below).
Here is the appropriate location for the filters:
This assumes that your startup disk's name is "Macintosh HD". If it is different, just replace "Macintosh HD" with the name of your startup disk.
If you are running Lion or Mountain Lion (OS X 10.7.x or 10.8.x) then you should put the downloaded filters in "Macintosh HD/Library/PDF Services". This folder should already exist and contain files. Once you put the downloaded filters there, you should have for example one file with the following path:
"Macintosh HD/Library/PDF Services/Reduce to 150 dpi average quality - STANDARD COMPRESSION.qfilter"
If you are running an earlier vesion of OS X (10.6.x or earlier), then you should put the downloaded filters in "Macintosh HD/Library/Filters" and you should have for example one file with the following path:
"Macintosh HD/Library/Filters/Reduce to 150 dpi average quality - STANDARD COMPRESSION.qfilter"
Here is how to use it:
Open a PDF file using Apple's Preview app,
Choose Export (or Save As if you have on older version of Mac OS X) in the File menu,
Choose PDF as a format
In the "Quartz Filter" drop-down menu, choose a filter "Reduce to xxx dpi yyy quality"; "Reduce to 150 dpi average quality - STANDARD COMPRESSION" is a good trade-off between quality and file size
Here is how it works:
These are Quartz filters made with Apple Colorsinc Utility.
They do two things:
downsample images contained in a PDF to a target density such as 150 dpi,
enable JPEG compression for those images with a low or medium setting.
Which files does it work with?
It works with most PDF files. However:
It will generally work very well on unoptimized files such as scans made with the OS X scanning utility or PDFs produced via OS X printing dialog.
It will not further compress well-optimized (comrpessed) files and might create bigger files than the originals,
For some files it will create larger files than the originals. This can happen in particular when a PDF file contains other optomizations than image compression. There also seems to be a bug (reported to Apple) where in certain circumstances images in the target PDF are not JPEG compressed.
What to do if it does not work for a file (target PDF is too big or even larger than the original PDF)?
First,a good news: since you used a Save As or Export command, the original PDF is untouched.
You can try another filter for a smaller size at the expense of quality.
The year being 2013, it is now quite easy to send large files through the internet using Dropbox, yousendit.com, wetransfer.com etc. and you can use these services to send your original PDF file.
There are other ways of reducing the size of a PDF file, such as apps in the Mac App store, or online services such as the free and simple http://smallpdf.com
What else?
Feel free to use/distribute/package in any way you like.

Thanks ioscar.
The original link should be back online soon.
I believe this is a Dropbox error about the traffic generated by my Dropbox shared links.
I use Dropbox mainly for my business and I am pretty upset by this situation.
Since the filters themsemves are about 5KB, I doubt they are the cause for this Dropbox misbehavior!
Anyway, I submitted a support ticket to Dropbox, and hope everything will be back to normal very soon.
In the meantime, if you get the same error as ioscar when trying to download them, you can use the link in the blog posting he mentions.
This is out of topic, but for those interested, here is my understanding of what happened with Dropbox.
I did a few tests yesterday with large (up to 4GB) files and Dropbox shared links, trying to find the best way to send a 3 hour recording from French TV - French version of The Voice- to a friend's 5 year old son currently on vacation in Florida, and without access to French live or catch up TV services. One nice thing I found is that you can directly send the Dropbox download URL (the one from the Download button on the shared link page) to an AppleTV using AirFlick and it works well even for files with a large bitrate (except of course for the Dropbox maximum bandwidth per day limit!). Sadly, my Dropbox shared links were disabled before I could send anything to my friend.
I may have used a significant amount of bandwidth but nowhere near the 200GB/day limit of my Dropbox Pro account.
I see 2 possible reasons to Dropbox freaking out:
- My Dropbox Pro account is wronngly identified as a free account by Dropbox. Free Dropbox accounts have a 20GB/day limit, and it is possible that I reached this limit with my testing, I have a fast 200Mb/s internet access.
- Or Dropbox miscalculates used bandwidth, counting the total size of the file for every download begun, and I started a lot of downloads, and skipped to the end of the video a lot of times on my Apple TV.

File Size of PDFs in Preview

I scan a lot of documents for record keeping purposes. I set the scanner to 300 dpi, black and white. This keeps the file size down and the document is readable and printable (close to the original), and the scanning is quick. I scanned three sets of documents (about 15 pages each) this way and saved them as PDFs. The file sizes were 3.1 MB, 3.2 MB, and 1.8 MB. I used Preview to combine the three documents into one PDF. The resulting file was 19.3 MB. Why so large? 3.1 + 3.2 + 1.8 = 8.1 What is going on here? How do I keep the file size down when using Preview? I don't want to buy PDF Studio (or some tool like it) if I can avoid it (they all seem so mediocre).

Try Combine PDFs
<http://www.monkeybreadsoftware.info/Freeware/CombinePDFs.shtml>
I scan at 600 bpi into TIFF, then use Graphics Converter to save with the CCITT 4 compression. I get about 12:1 compression, with no loss of quality. The result is still TIFF, so you don't have to uncompress to use them.

Preview.app increases PDF file size.

When making changes to a PDF (in my case, creating annotations), Preview.app will increase the file size of a PDF if that PDF was run through Acrobat Pro's "Reduce File Size" process. For example, I have a PDF that I created using a Book2Net book scanner. I then used Acrobat Pro 10 to OCR the file, then ran Reduce File size which shrank the file size from almost 1.6gb down to about 62mb. If I use Preview.app to make an annotation and then save the file, Preview.app will inflate the file back up to 1.6gb.
An earlier thread (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1478588?start=0&tstart=0) also discusses a similar issue. I'm not sure if those folks were also working with PDFs that were reduced in size by Acrobat Pro or not.
Anyone else have this issue?
10.6.8 on a MacBook Pro.

That is not normal. same action with acrobat and skim do not do this. Changing file size from 170mb to 780mb (my case) should not be expected.
Preview re-formats the file (which takes a while the first "save"). It may even make scrolling and searching for text faster, but is not desirable all the time.
There is NO explanation from Apple in help or online. Keeping things simple is one thing, having unexpected and unexplained behavior is another.
Last preview update made it pretty much useless for annotations anyways.
Choosing "text" annotation used to allow for clicking anywhere on the pdf and start typing. Now, it automatically creates a text box at the center of page that has to be the dragged (and make sure not dragging other annotations with it). click T multiple times, multiple text boxes on top of each other.
I never thought I would look at Windows users with jealousy. What a bad job they are doing.

Reducing file size #2...Preview, Quartz Filter vs Adobe Pro Optimize

Questions on reducing a pages to pdf file…I will post each question seperatly.
2) I read that you can reduce file size of a pdf in preview with a quartz filter. I created my own filer and it worked as expected. But, I also have Adobe Acrobat Pro, with save as PDF Optimized. The pro seems to have much more capability than the quartz filters.
Is one better that the other to use? The adobe optimize (standard settings) took it from 20 to 6 megs.
THanks, Bob

The Adobe Acrobat settings you chose are probably using .jpeg to reduce the file size.
.jpegs are lossy. ie You lose detail and sharpness the more you compress the image.
The Quartz filters are usually of very high quality, but they are a black box and you need to understand what the settings are in each one. Quartz filters are extremely powerful, fast and as I said usually high quality but I suggest you experiment and see if they meet your needs.
Peter

Reducing PDF File Size Using Preview

Hi All,
Trying to reduce the size of a large pdf file. "Quartz Filter" pick in Preview (Snow Leopard) is no longer available in Lion.
Tried making new filter in ColorSync Utility and applying, but file size is still not reducing, in fact it increases. Any advise out there?
Thanks.

It is available, it's just that versioning is reaking havoc with folks 'cause you have to change your workflow:

Can I slim down the size of the Aperture Library by moving the Preview files elsewhere?

Hi all,
I have an Aperture library of almost 20,000 photos, dating back to around 2007. Almost all the master images are stored on an external drive (backed up of course), with only my recent and 'in progress' masters being stored in the library itself. Previously I have had my library split up into one library for each year, with the older years libraries being stored on the external drive where the masters are, in order to keep the size of my 'current' library down. So my current library, stored on my internal SSD, contained only photos from this year and last year, and only a few of the masters for these images. Confusing? Sorry!
Now, I recently decided to consolidate the libraries into one huge library, because it was annoying to have to switch between libraries to find older photos when I wanted them. I did this, leaving all but the recent masters on the external drives (referenced). I thought that the size of the main library would remain reasonably sized, since there were no extra masters being moved into it. However, the library has grown massively - up to over 70GB, which is huge when you consider it's on a 128GB SSD which is also my startup drive.
I'm pretty certain the reason for the huge size increase is that the Previews for all the older images are stored in the Library file, rather than anywhere else. This makes sense - they are previews, they're supposed to be able to be viewed with the external drives disconnected. So my question is this. Am I able to change the location of the preview files to be on my OTHER internal hard drive (non-SSD, much larger), so that they're still available without the external drives, but are not cluttering up my startup drive. And, if not, what should I do!?
Thanks a lot

Glad it worked, but permit, if you will, some observations:
-- Bloated Previews are a known Aperture bug, which came and went within a few updates in Aperture 3. Getting them back to the proper size is simply a elegant step to take.
-- A Preview set to your largest screen size and a quality of 6-8 should be all but indistinguishable from the Master at 72-100 dpi screen image. (Not print resolution.) I REALLY doubt you are going to loose any quality.
-- While using a symlink to stick the Previews on a HD is clever, it may also defeat the whole purpose of using your SSD. Previews are read a lot and are, I suspect, used for all adjustments at less than full resolution. (N.B. I could be VERY wrong on this.) Thus, depending on the amount of RAM on your Mac, you could end up reading and rereading your Previews over a slower link and doing this a lot. You own use will quickly determine if this is an issue or not.
I have blathered on, at length, about what I think matters for size and speed here: https://discussions.apple.com/message/17959625#17959625. Some of this may be of use.
I went through a lot of these issues when I tried to fit everything on a 128 GB SSD, so I know some of the issues you are facing. As I noted before, you really only need a Library (minus most Masters) of about 30 GB and that is with large, high quality Previews.
I actually took the SSD out and stuck it in an ancient MacBookPro (in preparation for a trip to Blighty this summer) and have not noticed a huge drop in Aperture speed. (I do miss the speed of applications launch, restart, however.) One thing that I did find that made a small, but nice difference, was keeping all of the Masters on a separate, dedicated drive. Once defragged, etc. that was very fast. Don't know if you could achieve the same results by partitioning a larger drive, but it might well be fun to find out.
DiploStrat

Why are Preview saved file sizes so HUGE?

We have a neat copier at work that will scan in a document and email the pdf to you. So I have a 100 page document that I scanned in 4 chunks that yielded 4 pdf files of about 2.5MB each. I opened the first in Preview and then dragged the remaining 3 files in to create my final 100 page document. When I did the Save command I was shocked to see the resultant file size came in at 27MB! I searched around the menus and tried a Save As and selected the option for just black and white. The file that was created when that command finished ended up being 67MB.
Anybody know how I can just get the originally expected 10MB file size? Many thanks in advance.

I just tried the Combine PDFs program and it also yielded a 27MB file size when the sum of all the input files was only 10MB. So now I'm really confused. If I had to take a guess, I'd say the pdf format supports some kind of compression and both Preview and Combine PDFs can read in compressed pdfs but can't write them. I still need to get down to the 10MB size (because I can't email the file 27MB size I ended up with) so I'm still looking for help.

Huge file size with Save for Web but preview is ok

Hi,
I have googled but not found anything about this but I have the same problem on my computer and also on a colleagues computer so it seems it should not be totally unknown.
This is what i do
1 Open a eps file, one color logo, 72dpi, size it to 110x21
2 save for web
3 select png-24 format. preview says file size ~1.3 kB
4 save -> actual file size on disk is 4 kB (ie 3 times bigger file size than it should be)
5 Preview and then right click in browser + save image as gives correct file size (on my colleagues computer this does not work, he always gets the wrong size)
I have also tried with gif and various settings, image sizes etc and the result is the same.
I'm using Windows Vista 32-bit and Photoshop CS4.
Is this a known problem?
Thanks

Thanks for your reply but i don't think that's it. When I check properties on the file in Windows it tells both "Size" and "Size on disk", where the latter is actual size on disk (depending on cluster size) but the size I am talking about is the first one.
Also just to be clear, when I say Preview, I mean clicking the Preview button that opens the file in a browser window. Not the preview within the Save for Web and Devices dialog. So I think this file is correctly created and *should* be the same as if I click Save (but it obviously isn't)
This sounds very much like a bug to me, anyone else who have seen this or can recreate?
Thanks

Enormous Preview file size

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