Reduce size of previous linked files

[GGG]

The reduction in file size of the linked files in the recent update is very impressive and a great improvement to the app.

However I have hundreds of GBs of linked files from previous edits. How can I apply the new file size improvements to these old files?

[Martin Chalifoux]

The new size reduction is great when adjusting sliders. If you use one of the pixel level function, such as Deband, Denoise, Erase/Repair, Cloning, it creates a new pixel layer and the sidecar remains very large with those functions. So it is not all sidecar files that are very small with the new process. But if you only do adjustments there is a significant improvement.

That said it would have been nice that the app be able to go back and downsize the old sidecar files. I think if you target the very largest one you could do some of this by hand by duplicating the image, revert to original the duplicate, then do a copy/paste of the adjustments on the fresh duplicate. But I didn't test this. It is certainly a slow process if you have a large number of images to do. But by targeting the very largest sidecar files you may be able to save many GB.

[Shelton]

I agree with Martin, I would think at this time the only way is to sort of re-edit the photo. I don't have any large sidecars to test on as I never kept them for that reason and the amount of icloud storage they used, sorry!

Shelton.

[nigelw]

I'd love if there was an update which migrated the old sidecar files to the new format. Re-editing to reclaim space is painful.