Small psd needing to be saved as a PSB

[alexia23646504vzp6]

Hi, having trouble saving any small PSD file, as it keeps saying that it exceeds 2G when it contains only layers of small images which should add up to not more than 500MB max! It happened to me several times and online support has not been able to identify or fix this problem. I am currently saving PSB but it's not the solution to my problem of course, as I end up having to delete entire working files in order to preserve hard disk space. This saving issue cropped up after an update some months ago.  Has anyone come across it and solved it, please? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[alexia23646504vzp6]

Thanks so much for this! This sounds interesting... (Most of the time, something's wrong with the metadata, and the capacity is ridiculously large, but it's solved by using a script to erase the metadata). Can you kindly instruct me on how to get hold / how to use a script to erase metadata, please?  Many thanks in advance. 

[Stephen_A_Marsh]

We tried to establish if there was excessive photoshop:DocumentAncestors metadata earlier in the thread, and this did not appear to be the case. For this specific metadata bloat issue, many methods are covered in my blogpost on the topic:

https://prepression.blogspot.com/2017/06/metadata-bloat-photoshopdocumentancestors.html

I have never heard of any other specific metadata issue, however, if this is the case then a different script or method would be required to target the unknown metadata.

The easiest way is to select all layers and then use Layer > Duplicate to duplicate the layers to a new file (don't duplicate the image). This is easy enough to do manually, however, a scripted version of this can be found here:

https://github.com/MarshySwamp/Remove-All-Metadata-Retain-Layers/blob/main/Remove%20All%20Metadata%2...

[craigs51993353]

Hi Alexia - I don't know if you're still having the problem or not but I have been frustrated by the same thing. What I experienced was trying to save a 400mp old psd file after adding a single curves adjustment layer and Photoshop 2025 changed the 400mb file to a 2.4gb file requiring saving as psb file. What I found was that if I did the edit in Photoshop 2021 adding the curves layer added essentially nothing to file size and I was able to save the file as a psd, no problem.  What appears to be happening is that files originally edited on legacy versions of Photoshop jump tremendously in size when saving on more current versions (perhaps Photoshop somehow replicates the file in each succeeding version before saving in the current version?? Who knows). Try saving your file in an older version of Photoshop and see if that solves your problem, it worked for me. 

Craig

[davescm]

@craigs51993353 Check the compression settings in Preferences File Handling. You may have one version set to compress and the other to no compression.

Dave

[craigs51993353]

Dave, you were spot on, problem solved!

Thanks so much!

Craig

[davescm]

@craigs51993353  No problem. Compression or no compression is a trade off between file size on disk and speed of saving and opening. Some opt for the smaller disk space by using compression others, including myself, opt for the much faster saving and opening times of the larger non-compressed files. It is good to have the option.

Dave