P: Externally Linked Smart Objects

@Powalowski, it's not about removing the preview feature, but empowering the user to get rid of it when it's more advantageous to do so.

In addition, disabling the preview not only frees space, it improves performance as well in the situations I'm advocating. I'm sure you understand that writing a +100MB preview to disk is slower than not writing anything at all. Without the need to write preview saves could be many times faster.

If the user loses linked files it might as well lose the psds themselves so that's a rather weak argument in my opinion.

@Reimund I think you're missing out the big displeasure of opening (maybe older) files containing lots of links while file structure has changed or while cooperating with others not wanting to exchange all the missing links.

This inconvenience would weight much more than several megabytes lost due to inclusion of previews. Imagine some old complex PSD you only want to add some little detail after months but keep the links at the state of original export. Relinking and reconstructions can quickly overweight the diskspace. Please Adobe don't drop previews.

Look over to Lightroom where with Smart Previews users actually are seeking for inclusion of previews sacrificing disk space.

@Adobe,

Thank you sooo much for your hard work listening to us and implementing great and useful features.

My Feedback on this:

have you considered adding a Links panel for better managing linked files inside Photoshop? This would fit into illustrators and indesign workflow and for me pretty much be a great consecutive addition.

Like so:


Also creating a dialog while dropping in resources into photoshop asking if resource should be placed rasterized, as Smart Object or as Link. (actually you can leave out rasterized :-D)

Setting default placing to Link instead Smart Object could also be a great option. I consider switching mainly over to Links instead of fully integrated SO.

Also better integration of Links in the layers context menu would be apperciated. I thing about options like (on Smart Objects) "replace contents with Link", "export contents as link (for converting SO to link)".

Defrickeling one big Photoshop file containing a lot of Smart Objects seems quite manual and memory expensive at the moment.

Thanks for your effort and big cheers!
Peace

Hi Chris,

I totally agree on keeping any preview! I'd even go for adding a full sized preview for later resize in case the link is not availiable. Does anybody really care about file size these days?
What is important is the fact that photoshop is able to recognize changes in the linked file. This finally brings non-destructive workflow closer to perfection.

I would go for any size if it enhances non-destructive workflow functionality (keeping performance in mind, specifically memory on this one).

What would be great would be a Lighroom option for "Open as linked Smart-Object in Photoshop"
This would make jfriedels "Layers in Lightroom" Approach obsolete I think.

In cases where you scale down the linked object (and when the object is a tree) sure, the preview might be smaller. But I don't think photographers agree (who would keep the linked object at full size). In those cases the preview of linked pictures (raw & jpegs) will typically always be larger than the linked file itself, rendering the link feature rather useless (for photographers that is, since for the most part orignals won't be edited once developed).

So I'd say it would be a huge benefit

I really hope you go through the hassle of adding it. It will so be worth it.

Again, there are many reasons to keep the preview just like it is. The complications and hassles added by not having the preview make it ever more necessary to keep the preview. The small benefit of _sometimes_ having smaller files really does not outweigh all the other factors that say we really need the flattened preview.

Chris, thanks for clearing things up.

My comments:

For compatibility you would just embed a low-res placeholder in place of the current flattened copy. Don't see any issue here.

I see the point about filters though. But that can be solved by just omitting to apply them on load, and let the user decide when to apply them.

I see the points about recursion too. But think about it this way: If the user has explicitly changed the setting to not keep any previews, I'm sure he can live with the cost in these cases too?

I understand that if there is depth to the tree of linked objects loading would be slower, but why not let the user decide when it wants previews and when it doesn't?

It could be a checkbox in the Properties panel, and to avoid these issues for users who don't grasp the consequences, let previews be the default. Upon the first time the box is unticked, pop up an alert explaining why things may load slower with previews disabled.

And for what it's worth, the numbers I mentioned above are not made up (in response to "The cost of storing the flattened preview is not as great as you claimed"). In fact, in cases where users version control their psds disk savings could be even greater.

Example: Create an empty document. Link a Nikon D800 picture. Psd would be about 70-200 MB depending on how detailed it is. Now add a text layer. Then commit to your repository. Now change the text layer. Do another commit. And there you go, that's an extra 70-200MB to your repository by just changing the text (since psds are treated as binaries). Now, this is for every commit! Without previews, however, you'd get about 50-150 times smaller a file (according to my tests).

Thank you for responding Jeffrey.

For compatibility with older Photoshop versions, wouldn't it be possible to insert a vector based placeholder image that explains that the linked object couldn't be resolved?

Though, there has long been an option in the prefs to never maximize psd file compatibility so in a way it's already been possible to go against that philosophy.

What other problems can you think of?

There's 20+ reasons that we really need the flattened preview -- compatibility, filter effects, document load times, making document loading deterministic (as opposed to open ended for recursive descent of the child documents), etc. The cost of storing the flattened preview is not as great as you claimed, and usually no greater than storing another pixel layer in the parent document.
Yes, we've spent quite a bit of time thinking this through -- and the previews really need to be there.

It's for file compatibility. Photoshop is a different animal from After Effects as it has always stored the complete sum of its parts to accurately represent the contents of the file for backwards compatibility. What you're asking for would go against that philosophy. It's not to say what you want is impossible, but it could be painful for other reasons.