Looking through my old design files from 2010 and the file sizes shocked me

I was cleaning out an old hard drive and opened a Photoshop file from a poster I made in college. The file was only 12 MB. I just finished a similar poster last week and the PSD was over 300 MB. I found this out when I tried to email the old file to myself as a reference and it sent instantly. It's crazy how much bigger and more complex our work has gotten, even for basic stuff. What's the biggest design file you've had to deal with lately?

3 comments

3 Comments

rowanbennett3mo ago

It's not just design files, it's everything. My phone now needs a cloud plan because a single photo takes up more space than my entire first MP3 player. We keep adding layers of data and quality without ever cleaning up the old way of doing things, so everything just swells. I opened a simple text document from 2004 recently and it loaded instantly, while a blank new document in my current word processor takes a few seconds to think about its life choices.

murray.gray3mo ago

Spot on, rowanbennett. Everything's just getting fatter for no reason.

reeselewis1mo ago

and honestly the worst part is we barely even need all that extra resolution most of the time. like your poster was probably fine at 300dpi or whatever but now software defaults to insane canvas sizes with like 20 hidden layers and smart objects that are basically full res photos. i remember when a 50mb file was a big deal now i have to force myself to clean up layers or flatten stuff just to keep things moving. its like every update adds more bloat without giving us tools to trim it back down. we seriously need a "strip all the useless junk" button that actually works.