Photoshop JPG file sizes are way too BIG!
Recently I received an unusual JPEG for a work project. The resolution was fairly low (1344×576) and the document resolution was also set to a relatively low screen resolution of 72dpi:
Everything looks normal here…
Normally I would anticipate this file being less than 1MB. However, it was over 10MB!
Something is amiss here, lets reduce this file size!
Copy and pasting the image content into a blank Photoshop file and saving as a JPEG also resulted in a 10MB file size. Even using a very high compression level (and thus reducing the image quality) resulted in a file that was still over 10MB!
I needed to reduce the file size for use on a very low-end LED signage machine while keeping it high quality. I was finally able to reduce the file size so by doing the following:
- Save the image as a PNG
- Open the PNG
- Resave the image as a high quality JPG
Performing these steps finally stripped out whatever extraneous information Photoshop was storing in the file and resulted in a filesize of less than half a MB. Much better! 🙂
This is a much more reasonable file size!
- https://www.jdhodges.com/blog/photoshop-jpeg-file-much-too-big-enlarged/ (1)
Didn’t work for me. I have a jpg that is a ridiculous 75.2 MB! There is no way it should be that big! Resizing it doesn’t work. Still a honkin’ 74 MB! I tried duplicating it and saving it that way, but no luck. Any other tips?
Hey Margaret, a 75MB JPG is very unusual and suggests there’s embedded data (like a large ICC profile, metadata, or even embedded layers) that Photoshop is preserving. The PNG round-trip trick in the post strips that. If that’s not working, try going to File > Save for Web (or Export > Save for Web in newer versions) and saving as JPG from there. Save for Web aggressively strips metadata and embedded profiles. That should get you way below 10MB.