Skip to main content
C
Cygnus_200
Participating Frequently
June 19, 2026
Question

Saving PSB as PSDC

  • June 19, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 0 views

I forgot to change to heading to something which would describe what I have here better. 

 

I have a very large file (the “Working Copy” I refer to below)  that I am working on, 10GB+. The dimensions are 41000+ x 22000+ px (600 ppi). If I remember correctly, it was a .psd but is now a .psb. I don’t know when it changed. I noticed it yesterday and it surprised me as I have found it as .psd before,  I think. About a week ago or so, I could, after a bit of searching online, save it to the cloud. I am a beginner and have really no clue at all what I am doing and how things work. 

 

For a short description of what happened, read below. For my questions, jump to the questions at the bottom.

 

After I had uploaded it, it first really slowed down my pc and it autosaved too often. (I asked a question about it last week:

.) 

 

I stopped using the psdc file and turned again to the file I have on my pc. To my surprise it began to run so much smoother now. It flowed on very nicely. It was not slow, it did not slow down my pc as it used to do before I had uploaded it to the Cloud. The difference was very noticeable and my patience was no longer tested, no more bad language uttered and my pc safe, i.e., staying on the desk instead of flying out of the window. I was happy again. My pc too, or perhaps it was more relieved than happy.

 

Then… something happened, and I don’t know what.

 

I opened another copy of the same file next to the working copy and moved a layer with a wooden frame (from the PS library) and from that moment PS slowed down my computer again tremendously, more than it did before I had uploaded it to the Cloud. 

 

I don’t rememer the exact steps I went through after this, but I removed the psdc from the cloud and tried to upload the working copy again, but as I found out today, the dimensions and size are so much larger than what is, or should be,  possible to do.

 

My questions:

  1. The original file that I uploaded to the Cloud is the same as the Working Copy which has the size I mentioned above and it should not have been possible to upload it. Why could it be uploaded while it is too large for that? 
  2. Why can’t the Working Copy be uploaded to the Cloud again when it could before, even though it is too large?
  3. Why can’t psb be changed to .psd when it was possible to upload it to the cloud earlier?

 

Magnus.

    1 reply

    D Fosse
    Community Expert
    D FosseCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    June 19, 2026

    This is a huge file! What’s it for? 41k x 22k is much bigger than you would normally need for any practical purposes.

     

    First of all, it’s a PSB because it’s too big for the PSD specification.

     

    Uploading a file of this size to any cloud service is not something I would attempt. Not only will it take a long time to upload, but that upload needs to happen continuously. No wonder it’s slow. And in addition - the risk of file corruption is very high.

     

    And finally - even if you work on this file locally, on your own machine, you need the hardware to deal with it. Most importantly, it will eat up disk space really fast. Photoshop needs to move vast amounts of data around working on this file, orders of magnitude more than any RAM you may have installed. So all that temporary working data is written to disk. That is what is known as the scratch disk.

     

    In this case, you should have around 500GB - 1TB free space for the Photoshop scratch disk.

     

    One thing to consider is the number of history states you have set in Preferences. Each history state can potentially add the full uncompressed size to the scratch file. If you need to work with insufficient disk space, you also need to reduce the number of history states, perhaps all the way down to 1 or 2. 

    C
    Cygnus_200Author
    Participating Frequently
    June 19, 2026

    It is for a project that I am working on.

    Thank you for your reply, but it did not address all of the questions I had.

     

    The original file that I uploaded to the Cloud is the same as the Working Copy which has the size I mentioned above (10+GB, 41k x 22k) and it should not have been possible to upload it, not only because of the size and dimensions, but also because it was a psb. Why was uploaded while it was a psb and too large? 

     

    Even though the file is too large for the Cloud, it is there and I have it opened on the pc now. I opened it from Creative Cloud Desktop and it is a .psdc,10+GB and 41071 x 22057 px (600 ppi). I can work on it, but it autosaves too often so I don’t. I think I have more than 1 TB free, but I have no idea if it is on that scratch disc or not.

     

    After I switched back to the file on the computer everything began to flow so much better, but something happened after I copied a layer on to the Working Copy and it was again slow, much worse than before I uploaded it to the Cloud.

    Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement
    Using the community Terms of use Privacy Cookie preferences Do not sell or share my personal information ad choicesAdChoices