Saving to PNG Painfully SLOW

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
January 22, 2021
15 replies
13261 views

Anyone else experiencing very very slow times to save PNG with the latest Photoshop version?

I can save PNG using Apple Mac with the simple Preview app in a fraction of the time Adobe Lightroom takes. Is it just a bug in my version, or does everyone else experience this as well?

F

ffnug

Known Participant

I noticed 'Save as PNG' became laggy and buggy a few versions back on PC but I noticed that this behavior stopped when I was on my company VPN so I'm thinking that there may be some network round-trip involved?

heywoodj88790367

Participant

It has been several years. WHY is this still such a huge problem? I have certain PNGs which will never finish saving. Saving PNG used to be instant before somebody pushed some crap spaghetti code several years ago. I have to copy and paste it into MS PAINT to save out PNGs at times.

Lynx_TWO

Participant

So, I doubt this is a bug: Photoshop uses extremely brute-force settings to save your PNG file if you use the Smallest Filesize settings. It basically tries a ton of different combinations and methods one at a time and compares the resultant filesize to find the compression and optimization settings that result in the smallest file size. This can take a very long time with large dimensions. What will likely work better for you is to save a file as a PNG with the quickest settings, then use a batch program like Caesium Image Compressor (free) to batch-compress the large PNG files since Caesium is optimized for multiple threads. Worst case scenario, with a lot of large files you just let it run overnight.

Hope this helps! Link is here: https://saerasoft.com/

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Martin32279432sa1y

Participating Frequently

I have long since accepted that the quickest way around this is to convert PNG collections to TF (I use Irfanview, very quick), and then convert back. Annoyingly, TIF is unusable for many other parts of the procedure (such as online colorization), so I have to plan this out. But Photoshop saves TIF files very, very quickly. Usually instantaneously.

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MicahGanske

Participant

I recently discovered that right-clicking on a layer and doing a "quick export as png" is the fastest way to save transparent pngs from photoshop.

With that said, I feel your pain as I curse photoshop on a daily basis for things that just don't work as well as they did 10 years ago. Simple things like just backing up settings and hotkeys has become incredibly annoying and broken. Adobe doesn't listen as they're too busy adding toy features to Photoshop to convince casual users to pay for a subscription.

joeri.kassenaar

Participant

It's worse.
As a paying customer I constantly need to prove to Adobe it's really me.
They only care about money, not about usablility.

ジ

ジョルダーノ

Inspiring

Tested with Photoshop 2023 and saving png with "Smallest file size" it's insanely slow, almost 2 minutes for a 5000x5000 file. I use the Image Processor Pro script to save multiple versions of the same file, but the same happens with "Save a Copy as".

"Export as" doesn't take more than a second to save the same file.

So why not using the same code to export png files???

Stephen Marsh

Community Expert

Tested with Photoshop 2023 and saving png with "Smallest file size" it's insanely slow, almost 2 minutes for a 5000x5000 file. I use the Image Processor Pro script to save multiple versions of the same file, but the same happens with "Save a Copy as".

"Export as" doesn't take more than a second to save the same file.

So why not using the same code to export png files???

By @ジョルダーノ

The "Export As" engine does not yet support actions or scripting, so you are stuck with Save As or Export > Save for Web code in Image Processor Pro. Have you compared the Save for Web option in Image Processor Pro?