File size increase moving from 2025 to 2026?

Forum|Forum|5 months ago
December 12, 2025
2 replies
1655 views

A bit of a headscratcher. I made a simple edit to 4 files, changing a blending mode on a raster layer from screen to normal. All files ballooned up by about 100MB, from ~450MB to 550MB. Did something change with how raster files are stored in AI files? No settings have been altered by me, but files are inflating on their own.

I did try to save without preview as a , and it reduced about 200-300MB, resaving with preview, brought it back up to an inflated size. Looking into a separate issue with PNGs/TIFs inflating when reducing their resolution. Curious if anyone has seen similar.

Abhishek Rao

Community Manager

Hi @_wckdTall_ and @lsmetak,

Thanks for sharing your observations and for the detailed examples. I wanted to let you know that this behavior has now been logged as a bug, and the product team is actively investigating the file size increase when saving Illustrator 2026 files with PDF compatibility enabled.

I'll keep this thread updated as soon as I have more information or a fix to share.

Thanks again for your patience, and please feel free to add any new findings in the meantime.

Abhishek

L

lsmetak

Participant

@Abhishek Rao Thank you! I tried reverting back to the last version Illustrator 2025. I did not uninstall 2026 though. However, the 2025 files is even larger. Do you know if this problem started in the later versions of 2025?

L

lsmetak

Participant

I went back a few more versions to 29.5. and the files are back to the normal size. Somewhere between 29.5 and 29.8 it started bloating the files.

Abhishek Rao

Community Manager

Hi @wckdtall,

Thanks for bringing this up. I tested a similar workflow in Illustrator 2026(v30.1) and only saw a small increase in file size, so the jump you're seeing doesn't seem to happen with all files. To understand this better, could you please confirm the exact version of Illustrator 2026 you're using, such as v30.0 or v30.1, OS details and also check whether the Create PDF Compatible File option was enabled when saving. This setting adds PDF data inside the .ai file, which can noticeably increase file size even with minor edits. You can also review this article on optimizing Illustrator and PDF file sizes for more details: https://adobe.ly/3MwoGkM

It would also help if you could share one of the affected AI 2025 files, so we can look at what might be contributing to the increase and try to reproduce it on our side. If the file is confidential, feel free to send it via DM using any cloud-sharing service like Google Drive or Dropbox.

Looking forward to your update.

Abhishek

_wckdTall_Author

Inspiring

@Abhishek Rao
Illustrator 30.0
Mac 15.6.1
Both are using PDF compatible file. I unfortunately can't send to you here as they are confidential.
_wckdTall__1-1765585233923.png

_wckdTall_Author

Inspiring

@Abhishek Rao Shared files via DM, any chance you were able to review?

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