Hi all, I am curious about the Storyline file size (not the publish size). Here are two case study: 1. Start with a new file, and just created one slide. The file size is around 165KB. 2. Start with existing file that has 65 slides. The file size is around 40MB. Deleted all the slide except one slide. The file size went down to 2MB. So here is my question? Why can the file size does not go down even more? Is Storyline keeping all the "junk"? Can someone explain this? and if there is a way to "optimize" the file size? Thanks in advance.

Good Afternoon, Benny. I see two similar forum threads here and here. In summary, there are a few points to be gathered: Publishing the file seems to improve the efficiency of the file size. Working from a network drive or flash drive may worsen the storage efficiency. The "Save As" function has been known to help at times. There is no "Optimize" or "Compact" function within Storyline to assist with this. The impact of file size seems to be minimal except in cases of needing to email a file, in which case tools such as Dropbox or YouSendIt will help. Please let us know if you have any other questions or concerns. Thanks!

I've reviewed the summary above, as well as the 2 other threads that Justin linked to. Yes, the humongous .story file is on my hard drive (not a network or thumb drive). Yes, I tried Save As -- multiple times. Yes, I tried both Save and Save As after publishing the course -- to both LMS and to Web. Yes, I tried importing the slides from my original course into a new course. NO. None of those worked to reduce the size of the .story file. Even if any of those steps could consistently reduce the size, Articulate REALLY needs to develop an "optimize/compact size" function. One shouldn't have to jump through hoops for something this basic.

I appreciate the offer, Justin, but I've already spent way too much time on this issue. I don't have the time to try to upload a 299MB file (bloated from swapping videos). I have submitted this as a feature request -- though, based on previous threads, this really should already be a priority for the development team.

Hello, we have the same issue. We observed that the project files size always increase and never decrease, even changing the theme or removing some content. I was just curious to see what's in a .story file and I unzipped it. I discovered that in my project file, with just 8 slides, there are stored 3449 (!) XML file in the slideLayouts folder, and 576 XML files in the slideMasters folder. The media folder, that's supposed to be the largest one, is the smallest and contains just what's supposed to be there. I think Storyline 2 needs a sort of autoclean feature in order to remove all the unused and unreferenced stuff inside the project file.

Hi Justin, You'll see that this discussion dates back some time, and the majority of folks were able to resolve issues with the bloated size by doing a Save as and removing other unnecessary items such as unused slide masters or screen recordings. If you have an example where the file size is continually increasing in size no matter what you do, I'd love to have our team take a look at it. Can you share that with our Support Engineers here?

Storyline file size | Articulate

BennyKurniawan
Community Member
10 years ago
I am second to "Optimize/Compact" Storyline file size. Just bumped to the same issue again today. Fortunately the published file size is acceptable.
EmilyBurnett
Community Member
10 years ago
Hello Benny!

You can submit the request here.
FrankPietranton
Community Member
10 years ago
The good news: I just found a solution. The bad news: it is an EXTREMELY inefficient process.

I started a brand new SL project, and then imported the slides from one of the segments that I created from the master (file NCO Online 030215 in the attached screenshot). I then had to set all the player settings to what I needed and then saved that file (as I did before) and SL did indeed decrease the file size (again...see attached screen shot).

This means that I have to do this for all 17 of my segments...ARGH!!
AshleyT-Pollard
Staff
10 years ago
Hi Frank,

Our team is aware of this, and it seems it's not removed on the first save/save as - a lingering effect of the "undo" button. If you then open it and save again, it should be removed completely and update your file size. I'll include this thread in the report filed with our QA team so that we can update you here once there is additional information to share.
edutechdiva
Community Member
8 years ago
Is there an update to this issue? Any features yet released to combat the notorious file bloat?
AshleyT-Pollard
Staff
8 years ago
Hi Tonya,

There isn't an update to this issue at the moment, although you'll see that doing the save as and reopening a file does tend to help with the file size becoming unmanageable even if you've removed elements. If you've got a .story file that you want us to take a look at we're always happy to do so, and you can share it with our team here. That way we can double check what's happening in your file and share any additional findings with our QA team.
MassimoScali
Community Member
8 years ago
Hello again,

I add some more details to what just written. Even the themes can become huge files. We had a simple theme with just a picture (6k) and an horizontal line. Its size was more than 15MB. More than this, saving it again, after removing some unused master slides it became larger than 27MB!

Again I unzipped the theme file and I discovered that in the media folder were stored several mp3 files and they were the audio from the project slides (not from the masters).

I want to point out that using that theme was a mess, because it took a very long time to apply it and even saving the project using that theme was impossible: each saving operation took several minutes (from 5 to 10). Besides the system memory used by Storyline was always growing reaching over 3GB.

My question is, why are those audio files stored in a theme file?

Kind regards
AshleyT-Pollard
Staff
8 years ago
Hi Massimo,

Thanks for sharing those details here. I would like to have our team take a look at the .story file to see what's occurring and how the audio files are linked. Can you share a copy of the project file with our team here? You'll want to upload the .story file.
JohnSmiddy
Community Member
8 years ago
Has this been fixed in Storyline 3?
LeslieMcKerchie
Staff
8 years ago
Hi John - Looks like I responded to a similar question here.
- JohnSmiddy
  Community Member
  8 years ago
  Hi Leslie,
  
  Thanks for getting back to me. Still no luck on the file size. I've moved
  on to the next thing.