I’m working on a portfolio website for my work and the Sparkle file size is currently 5.92GB which seems pretty big to me, does anyone know if this is too large or if something is wrong?
To clarify, I use PhotoShop layered PSD files for my visuals which are huge but I flatten them and save them as JPG files. These are generally around 5 or 6mb in size. I have around 120 of these on my site and while I realise Sparkle makes multiple images for all different resolutions, the file size still seems too big and maybe unwieldy.
In addition, exporting to disk takes so long. Does anyone know if this is right?
I’m also wondering how to reduce the size of the project, so I’m asking if it would help to reduce the photos to the largest web view size of 1920 pixels.
The current photos have a resolution according to the camera of 5184 x 3456 p
Hi @Josef mine are pretty much the same size – 5000 x 3333 pixels and I was wondering what’s the smallest I can get away with bearing in mind retina on large desktops…
It’s storing the original image in the project file (a real pain IMO as you’re storing it twice). You could use a gallery/image grid with Lightbox and specify (on the “edit” pop-up) to store them in their original location. That’s the cause of the large project file. Not obvious - I only learned this yesterday!
It does all the compression and resizing whilst publishing. If you use publishing settings to allow multiple FTP connections this allows some of this task to be done in parallel.
yes plain images in a page (as opposed to galleries or image grids) are stored inside the project file
yes the project file can grow a lot
in Sparkle 5 the larger project file has minimal impact on loading or saving time, due to the new storage format that only loads actually required assets, only saves changes to the file, and uses copy-on-write features of APFS to save a copy of the project file
storing images (or videos, downloads, etc) in the original location certainly cuts down on the project size, but on the flip side it can happen that the resource is disconnected; we don’t know exactly why this happens, but when it does it’s painful, and a bit more space used saves a lot of pain (and to be extra clear, it’s macOS that controls this, it’s not a Sparkle bug)
in theory you could have a 1920 pixel wide layout, a full size image, a retina version of that and handily get over 4000 pixels of width, and if the image is portrait that would mean using 6-8000 pixels vertically… in practice it would be madness to have such a large image in my opinion, but it’s not impossible
so the size of the source image really only depends on the size you are using it in the canvas; if your image is say 500x300 in a desktop layout, in practice the maximum pixel density of most desktops is 2x, so 1000x600 would be enough, on mobile you can have 3x as well, but images are generally somewhat smaller
I think it’s a good thing to leave some extra pixels in the source project so you have the creative freedom to change things around a bit and not have the image quality suffer too much
with that said, out of camera images can be slower to load and affect canvas, preview and export performance, say camera raws or even iPhone heic images, they’re all slower than jpegs to load (just a problem with the encoding algorithm, not something Sparkle can do anything about)
about export parallelism, since version 4 Sparkle decouples image compression from FTP connections, if you have a 14 CPU Mac, Sparkle will use all 14 to compress images, even with a single FTP connection