Forum Discussion
Storyline file size
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.
55 Replies
Hi Justin! We'd be happy to take a peek at your file. Click here to start a case, and be sure to let us know your case number so we can follow along.
Hi, not sure if you are still having issues but i found the quickest way to reduce files size is to create a new, storyline project, and then using the Import function to import the old large project.
This just recently reduced a 50MB file for me down to 33mb.
I figure its only importing the used images etc and not keeping the ones I may have replaces or changed (The same way deleting unused objects in Adobe Captivate works)
Hi Flynn,
That's really great to know! Thank you for taking the time to teach me something new about Storyline through the help post.
Wishing you great health,
David Brick
Sr. E-Learning Specialist
Stanford Children's HealthCONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This communication and any attachments may contain confidential or privileged information for the use by the designated recipient(s) named above. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that you have received this communication in error and that any review, disclosure, dissemination, distribution or copying of it or the attachments is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please contact me and destroy all copies of the communication and attachments. Thank you.
Hi David,
I'm glad that Flynn's share was able to help you out as well. I appreciate you popping in to share.
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I am currently experiencing this issue. I have a file that unfortunately increased to over 200 mb! And now I cannot seem to reduce it.
I found that I had mistakenly imported three very large images (ca 80 + 50 + 50 mb). To tro to fix it, I used the "replace image" function in the media library, and replaced them with the smaller versions of these images. This however seems to only have increased the file size up to 207 mb in total! I used "save as", and a different version name - so I have both files to compare.
Then I also found tips here about starting a new file and importing the storyline-slides to, but that file also turned out to be 207 mb.
It seems these images (or something else) is stored and hidden in the file. I cannot keep working with it even, because it is so large and lagging the software.
What more can I try to fix this?
Have you tried publishing the work in progress? I recently used Replace Image to shrink a lot of images, but it seems like the file size shrunk after a Publish.
Another thing I discovered in the Replace feature was the ability to see how many times an image was used. In my case, instead of "replacing" an image, I deleted the second instance of an image, went to the first instance of an image, then copy/pasted it at the location of the second instance. Storyline counted that as one image used twice, instead of two images.
I did a publish now, and the zipped scorm file turns out to be only 34 mb, so that's good. But did you really mean that your storyline file got reduced after you did a publish? This did not happen for me. The storyline file is still 207 mb. And I even tried a new "save as" after the publish.
Most of my images are only used once. but sure, I went in and deleted a copy of a slide that I had saved as a backup alternative version of a slide I had experimented a bit on about the design. Therefore, I got rid of approx 10 small images that was used twice. I saved the file (again, save as) and even now - when I have deleted this slide, and can see in the media bank that there are less images in there, the file size remains 207 mb.
Doesn't make any sense to me.
Keep in mind that "best practice" includes saving valuable files to a location that is backed up (preferably a daily, organizational backup with redundancies) on a continual basis.
For example, in our organization only network and cloud based storage is systematically backed up routinely. Laptop and Desktop local hard drives are not backed up by the organization... hence the end user is responsible for doing that, and/or is responsible for any lost data due to a local drive failure.
Hi DOMETIC Academy one option is to duplicate the slide that had the overly large image on it and then delete the original file. The idea being it only duplicates the smaller image and then you can delete the original slide that for whatever reason is using so much space. if that does not work try doing the same with the whole scene
