And yet another experiment arrives on my desk so soon after I completed the Dropbox project.

This would be the compression of every PSD file I have to TIF. Both formats support layers but the TIF format compresses to a larger degree. Sometimes not as much but in some cases, it can be a massive amount. This in turn will mean I get more out of the Dropbox storage.

The art files I create range from 100 MB to 1.6 GIG in size, the average is around 400-600 MB.

So let’s take the current art folder for Ella Ganza and Ginger MisDemeanour.

So the files do load slower than the PSD files, but the idea here is that they are for archival storage and I will very rarely be going back to them. If I do then I am not worried about the few more seconds it takes to open them.

So how do I go about converting all of the PSD files to TIF? I have a couple of choices.

Use a Photoshop droplet to automate the opening of the PSD and save them immediately back out as a TIF with ZIP compression with layers and overall compression.

Open them all up one at a time and see if there is any further work I can do to reduce the file layers before saving them as a TIF.

I started to use the droplet method which worked very well but I noticed that some of the older files were not compressing as much as I thought they could have. Looking at them, I saw that they had left many unwanted layers in the files, which could be removed and reduce the file size further when saving as a TIF. So it is good to go back and take a look at them to see how much more I can save.

So after a couple of days of work, converting all my PSD files to TIF, I found a number of duplicate files and a large number that benefited from removing a few unwanted layers, I have managed to save 86 GIG of space. This of course needed to be updated on the Dropbox archive but as the following image was being worked on the previous one was being updated so it didn’t take long for both the PC and Laptop archives to match.