I notice that my .story file appears to be quite large given the amount of media it contains, and on closer inspection and having converted the .story to .zip, I notice that the \media folder contains older versions of videos and images that no longer appear in any slides.
I am confused as to why these files are retained in the package despite having been deleted and if there is a way to remove them within Articulate 3 itself.
Storyline may keep copies of older videos in the event that you use the Undo function to revert any changes you made. If you'd like to have those things removed entirely, look at doing a "Save As" to create a new copy of your project and that should remove those extra files.
Appreciate you giving that a try, Gareth! Sorry to hear you're still at this roadblock.
With your permission, I'd like to test your .story file to see what's happening with the file size and media. You can share it publicly in the forums here, or send it to me privately by using this upload link.
Was this ever resolved? I have ASL 3, and am experiencing the same issue after replacing 2 videos, 720p mp4's a total of about 7 minutes of length to them. My project ballooned from about 750MB to something like 1.2GB. Save As led to a file that was identical in size. Saving is now even slower than it was. I'm not in a position to share my .story file however so I'd be interested in what i'm looking for and how to engage support. This story may have some roots in storyline 2 if it makes any difference.
Edit: interesting. Initial Save As of the file kept it up at 1.2GB. When I quit storyline though, I checked the size on the new file again, and it was back down to the 750MB range. So it appears the Save As ultimately did work when combined with closing the new file.
Hi. I know this thread is a few years old, but I've just discovered a trick for locating hidden asset files that are inflating the overall story file size and I'm excited to share it.
I had a single embedded video in my story, but the overall file size was more than twice the video size, although the Media Library inventory couldn't account for it. So I used a trick I learned about here on the community site (thank you contributors!) to find out what was taking up so much space: (1) make a copy of your .story file, (2) change the extension of your copy from .story to .zip, (3) extract/unzip the file, (4) find the media folder (my path was: story > media), (5) sort by size to find the largest culprit.
The thing was, even though the video was used only once on 1 slide, I found it listed twice in the media folder. Even after I deleted the single instance of it from my slides, and it disappeared from the Media Library, my overall .story file size was nearly the same (still twice the video size but there were zero videos in there now). I was stumped. So, here's the 2nd trick I used: (1) use trick 1 above but stop at step 2, (2) double-click the still zipped file to find any files in the media folder that shouldn't be there and delete them, (3) rename the file back to .story from .zip. That's it! My story was still intact and working perfectly but my file size was hugely reduced. I then added back the video that I wanted and my overall file size increased by just that video's size. My overall file size was finally what it should be (reduced by half!). So happy.
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Hi Gareth,
Storyline may keep copies of older videos in the event that you use the Undo function to revert any changes you made. If you'd like to have those things removed entirely, look at doing a "Save As" to create a new copy of your project and that should remove those extra files.
Thanks for the reply Ashley. Alas, "Save As" hasn't reduced the file size - the said media remains in the source folders.
Appreciate you giving that a try, Gareth! Sorry to hear you're still at this roadblock.
With your permission, I'd like to test your .story file to see what's happening with the file size and media. You can share it publicly in the forums here, or send it to me privately by using this upload link.
I'll delete it once we solve this puzzle!
Was this ever resolved? I have ASL 3, and am experiencing the same issue after replacing 2 videos, 720p mp4's a total of about 7 minutes of length to them. My project ballooned from about 750MB to something like 1.2GB. Save As led to a file that was identical in size. Saving is now even slower than it was. I'm not in a position to share my .story file however so I'd be interested in what i'm looking for and how to engage support. This story may have some roots in storyline 2 if it makes any difference.
Edit: interesting. Initial Save As of the file kept it up at 1.2GB. When I quit storyline though, I checked the size on the new file again, and it was back down to the 750MB range. So it appears the Save As ultimately did work when combined with closing the new file.
Hi there, Todd. Thanks for the update! Let me know if you see any other sticky media issues that are bloating your projects.
Hi. I know this thread is a few years old, but I've just discovered a trick for locating hidden asset files that are inflating the overall story file size and I'm excited to share it.
I had a single embedded video in my story, but the overall file size was more than twice the video size, although the Media Library inventory couldn't account for it. So I used a trick I learned about here on the community site (thank you contributors!) to find out what was taking up so much space: (1) make a copy of your .story file, (2) change the extension of your copy from .story to .zip, (3) extract/unzip the file, (4) find the media folder (my path was: story > media), (5) sort by size to find the largest culprit.
The thing was, even though the video was used only once on 1 slide, I found it listed twice in the media folder. Even after I deleted the single instance of it from my slides, and it disappeared from the Media Library, my overall .story file size was nearly the same (still twice the video size but there were zero videos in there now). I was stumped. So, here's the 2nd trick I used: (1) use trick 1 above but stop at step 2, (2) double-click the still zipped file to find any files in the media folder that shouldn't be there and delete them, (3) rename the file back to .story from .zip. That's it! My story was still intact and working perfectly but my file size was hugely reduced. I then added back the video that I wanted and my overall file size increased by just that video's size. My overall file size was finally what it should be (reduced by half!). So happy.