illustrator cant handle lots of big jpg files

[danezeq]

i'm downloding lots of airial photos from GIS and connect them each other in illustrator to a big image. i'm doing so in illustrator beacuse i need to draw some rectangels and lines on it.

the thing is illustrator is creating a huge size AI file (more then 2GB so far and i still have lots of jpgs to add. now it don't let me save the file and loading 2 min for saving.

i don't get something. each jpg is only 3mb. total of 108MB so far. why does illustrator making t 2gb file from it?

am i working on the wrong software?

[Ton Frederiks]

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@danezeq wrote:

am i working on the wrong software?

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Yes, Photoshop is best equipped to handle and combine images.

Photoshop also has tools to create rectangles and lines.

Illustrator will decompress the jpegs and save them uncompressed in the .ai file (and also a copy if PDF compatibility is checked during saving), resulting in large files.

[danezeq]

i already made day of work on this combined iamge in illustrator.

is there any way to make illustrator compress the jpg files back?

or anyway to transfer the all work into photoshop and continue there?

[Ton Frederiks]

As long as they are embedded in the Illustrator file they are uncompressed.

You can try to export the Illustrator file as jpeg (but recompressing jpeg files will lose quality).