Files ballooning in size

[editor10]

We have a number of files for a photo publication, photos and text. The photos are straight out of iPhoto, full resolution, 1-5 MB. We made many separate files, some just one or two pages with one to three photos. These files have become much larger than it seems they should. For example, one with a 5 MB photo in it and a page of text, clocks in at 33 MB. All of them together are 1.5 GB.

This makes the joining of them into one pub, to turn into one pdf, rather impossible.

I tried doing a "save As" on the file mentioned, to see if the memory use of Undos might be causing the bloating. I guess it's an old Pagemaker trick. But no effect, still 33MB,

Any suggestions for reducing these to their true size? We need the photos to remain at high resolution.

Thanks,

[martin]

This FAQ entry on large file sizes should explain the situation and possible workflows to resolve the problem. Let me know if you have any further questions.

[editor10]

Thank you, Martin, that is what I needed to know. I'll print out two samples and see how much the image compression , from saving in .zrtf format, affects print copies. My eye can see a tiny difference which may not matter.

[martin]

Saving as a ".zrtf" won't affect the image quality at all. The compression is applied to the file as a whole and doesn't destroy any data (the compression is lossless). Images in ".zrtf" files are much smaller because we don't hex escape them (as required by some RTF readers) and we don't save redundant image data (for RTF readers that might not understand your native image file format).

[editor10]

Even better!

Thank you.