Speed of Saving Images

[David Eichler]

Saving images in Photoshop seems to have gotten very slow over the past 6-12 months or so. I am currently using the latest version of PS CC, and this has been occurring with earlier versions during that time period. I am talking about saving times of about 30 seconds or more that are more the rule than the exception. Occasionally, images will save in a matter of a few seconds, but this is rare. These are not exceptionally large files by today's standards and I am using a relatively modern late 2017 iMac. This is occurring with images saved to the iMac's internal SSD, as well as onto outboard drives. I am saving as Tiff files.

[MichaelEzra]

I find the same issue on Win 10x64. PS is on the border of being unusable in some cases and is gradually getting slower with every release. I am now trying out affinity photo, including on iPad.

[Eric Brody]

This has been an issue for me for a long time. I've asked a number of experts why it takes so bleepingly long to save my relatively large final master TIFF's (around 1GB). I've tried saving to a hard drive, a RAID, and an SSD and all seem to take distressingly long. I'm nowhere near enough of a computer expert to figure out why.

If someone has either a solution or an explanation, I'd love to hear it.

[kers]

Saving images in Photoshop seems to have gotten very slow over the past 6-12 months or so. I am currently using the latest version of PS CC, and this has been occurring with earlier versions during that time period. I am talking about saving times of about 30 seconds or more that are more the rule than the exception. Occasionally, images will save in a matter of a few seconds, but this is rare. These are not exceptionally large files by today's standards and I am using a relatively modern late 2017 iMac. This is occurring with images saved to the iMac's internal SSD, as well as onto outboard drives. I am saving as Tiff files.

Some information is missing:
What type of files, and how large are they?
In case of PSD-files it is way faster with compression OFF. (PSB files do not have compression)
Fastest saves are one layer tiff uncompressed.

[Eric Brody]

My TIFF's are almost always zip compressed, otherwise they exceed the 4GB TIFF size limit. I do a "save as," right after bringing the RAW ARW file into Photoshop from Lightroom Classic. I realize they might be slower, but I've timed saves to hard disks, my 24TB RAID 5 volume, or the 4TB SSD in my new iMac 2020. They seem to be within a few seconds with each method. Originally I had hoped saves to the RAID or SSD would be faster, it seems logical. Clearly a one layer TIFF will be fast but I choose to keep all my layers. This has proven to be invaluable when going back to older files.

[kers]

I am not suggesting you should flatten your images... not a good idea indeed...

I did a little test :
a 3GB PSB file with some layers saves here in 4 seconds (i have a very fast raid PCI SSD-raid )
the same file saved with tif LZW compressed takes 25 seconds.
Why? the main reason is the compression in photoshop - it only uses one core .. ( i have 10)
Since my files are 16bit, the LZW version is even larger than the PSB file. ( never use LZW with 16 bit images)

[David Eichler]

Some information is missing:
What type of files, and how large are they?
In case of PSD-files it is way faster with compression OFF. (PSB files do not have compression)
Fastest saves are one layer tiff uncompressed.

Single-layer, uncompressed Tiff files in the 50-150mb range.

[MichaelEzra]

For my setup saving 36 MP single layer 16 bit TIF uncompressed used to be taking about 1.5 second.
Now, with no hardware changes and confirmed identical performance of storage, it takes about 20 seconds.

Retouching performance is very sluggish as well.

[David Eichler]

For my setup saving 36 MP single layer 16 bit TIF uncompressed used to be taking about 1.5 second.
Now, with no hardware changes and confirmed identical performance of storage, it takes about 20 seconds.

Retouching performance is very sluggish as well.

Haven't noticed retouching performance suffering, though I have the impression that the refine edge brush has become wonky with the latest version of PS.

[David Eichler]

I just realized that the problem I have been having with this was due to a Lightroom setting. For editing in another program, I have always set this to no compression with Tiff files. Apparently, some update must have reset this to Tiff compression, since I cannot recall changing this setting. Now that I have reset this to no compression, things are back to normal, and files open and close in PS very quickly.