Cyber Weight and Big Rocks

Recently I was in my backyard and found some sizable rocks that needed to be moved. They had partially sunk into the ground after several years and needed to be dug free. Finally dead lifting rocks, even 50 -80 lbs rocks was not an easy task. These rocks were taking up valuable space and I had to ask myself were they decorative? If not, why were they still there?

Files created in Photoshop can grown to enormous sizes with layers, and composited images within the main image. The Cyber-weight of these images in some cases were over 500 Megabytes. These were high resolution files with large dimensions. During the editing process, I initially was not too concerned over the size of the files since I had plenty of storage space on my external drive. However, I did notice that it took longer to open these files and then save them when compared to my normal working files of 20-25 megabytes. If we were to compare this to the real world, this is like lifting those large rocks from the ground in my garden.

Depending on your computer, this can place a significant strain on the processor and graphics card. I have a reasonably powerful editing computer, but did notice some lags and even a freeze at one point since I was importing files from Lightroom which was still open.

When looking at the files, I had to consider how I was going to use them now, and reasonably in the future. Was I going to print the files? Did I really need all of those layers (in fact, most files only had 5 layers)?  Did the large files need to be submitted to a client?  

In the end, I decided to reduce the file dimensions on many of the files and even merge layers in several files. The space savings was not only incredible, but the speed at which the computer handled those files was increased dramatically. Many of the files that were so large were primarily for social media, so I had to ask myself why keep giant boulder files on my drive.

It seems reasonable to consider the Cyber-Weight of the files on your storage systems in relation to what you plan to do with the files. If unsure, certainly keep them as they are understanding that your computer may strain when processing those images. Are you sending a 200 megabyte file to someone who has a wimpy computer?  Many contests and even magazines have limits on the size of files that you can send them.  Of course, if you have a work in progress you certainly want to save your work with layers intact and at a higher resolution.