Help!! My photo folder uses 7 gig!

[bigkidjr]

Hi all. Lately, while using photoshop elements to convert my photos into photo-art (e.g., watercolors, etc), i've been getting an error msg that I am out of disk space. I can't even save any of my current work! I've tried defrag, clean-up, etc, but have just noticed that one of my picture folders is taking up a whopping 7 gig of harddrive space. Another has gobbled up 1.5 gig.

I'm looking for some advice on how to deal with this. I like to save my work as psd files so that i can preserve the layer info. otherwise, I'll never be able to figure out how I created various effects.

I using a Canon s50 (5 megapixels) for my photographs (just got it recently), and have been loading the photos into the computer at 100% resolution.

I'm assuming that there is probably a better way to do this, seeing as my 20-gig pc now seems to be out of disk space.

any advice you can give me would be MOST APPRECIATED!!

thanks --- Julie

[Doug Nelson]

A 5 megapixel image will take up 15mb (uncompressed), so only 60 photos will take up a gig of hd space (not even counting layers or other manipulations that add to the filesize).

I'd suggest you start offloading some to cd-rom, or do as I did and get a 2nd drive. 20gig is entry-level, nowadays. You can get a 200gig hd for under $200.

But, with blank cdroms costing 25 cents, that may be a more open-ended way to go.

[catia]

Actually, a second hard drive would help in other ways. Adobe recommends that the hard drive used for cache is a physically different hard drive than the one used for your system cache. So, a second larger drive will not only give you more space for images; but, should enhance PS7 performance as well. Having said that, it still isn't a bad idea to backup your work on CDs.

Catia

[roger_ele]

At the studio we have Windows XP. XP defaults to two virtual drives on the one hard drive, C & D. I noticed that the pictures and documents defaut windows directorys are on the C drive even though the D drive partition is the larger. Maybe this is why you are running out of space and you really do have room on your hard drive ...

Roger

[Ed_L]

Originally posted by roger_ele
At the studio we have Windows XP. XP defaults to two virtual drives on the one hard drive, C & D. I noticed that the pictures and documents defaut windows directorys are on the C drive even though the D drive partition is the larger. Maybe this is why you are running out of space and you really do have room on your hard drive ...

Roger

????? I have Windows XP, and it was installed by Dell when I bought my machine. It did not show a partition other than the C drive. This is the first time I've seen that mentioned.

I opted for a second (larger) hard drive, some time after I bought the PC. The second drive now is partitioned, and a small section is used for Photoshop's scratch disk, while the rest is used for everything but program files.

Ed

[svsg]

This may not be directly useful, but you can look in this direction.
As doug mentions, uncompressed 8-bit/channel file would occupy 15MB for a 5MP image out of your camera. Add to this various layers of this size and some channels and paths etc, you file can become really large.You say that you want to save your files as psd format, so that all layer information is intact. Is this only for reference or you want it for archival purpose? If you want it only for reference and do not expect the best quality, there could be some solution. I use Gimp(a photoshop like program that runs in unix/windows) which saves the files in its native format called XCF(like a PSD for photoshop).This is uncompressed and has all the layer,channel,paths info preserved. But there is another format supported by Gimp called .XJT which uses jpeg compression for the layers and uses further compressions for various things. I do not know if a similar thing is there for Photoshop, but you could do a search. I reproduce here what I found on the net about .XJT format.Maybe you could look in this direction for photoshop.

Svsg

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XJT uses JPEG compression for each layer or channel and TAR to collect all layers in one file. (Layers with alphachannels are split into 2 JPEG files). Additional property information about offsets, opacity, layer names etc. are stored in the readable textfile called "PRP" (Properties). The resulting tar-file is optionally compressed a 2nd time using GZIP or BZIP2 (filename ends in "gz" or "bz2" accordingly).
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[bigkidjr]

Hi again. Thanks, everyone, for all your helpful input! I went out yesterday and bought a CD burner, so that now when I project is finished, I can save it to a CD. I think this will help a lot in terms of keeping my harddrive relatively free. I guess I never realized just how quickly photos could take over all my free space!! Also, I figured out that at least for the projects I know are definitely finished, I'll save 1 flattened version (at high resolution) and then "miniaturize" the layered version to roughly 10% of it's original size. This way, all the layer info remains intact, but the file takes up much less space.

Thanks again for your input!

Julie