Way to consolidate shapes in a vector drawing?

[Sue.Martin.1]

I just made my first vector drawing using the Curvature Pen tool in Photoshop CC v. 20.  There are about a dozen shape layers that make up the image.  Merging the layers, as I feared, turned them into a raster image.  I put the layers in a group and am able to resize the group.  I also exported the group as an SVG file, but the file is only 4.90 KB, so how can that contain even a tiny fraction of the data from the 2.17 MB PSD file?  Photoshop requires me to rasterize the SVG file upon opening it, so that's worthless as far as preserving the vector image in a portable format that I can open and use in other Photoshop projects.

  What am I not understanding here, and is there any other standard procedure I should use to preserve my hard work in creating vector images?

[c.pfaffenbichler]

You omitted to post meaningful screenshots including the pertinent Panels.

Are all the Shape Layers the same color?

Merging the layers, as I feared, turned them into a raster image.

Merging several Shape Layers should create a Shape layer with one Vector Mask so you seem to be leaving something out in your description.

[Bojan Živković]

Which command you are using to merge shape layers? Layer > Combine Shape > choose option and optionally followed by Combine Shape Components should work fine.

You can not open in Photoshop raw SVG file, it must be rasterized during import.

You can open SVG format in Illustrator or open it in Google Chrome, for example, and see what is exported,

[c.pfaffenbichler]

Which command you are using to merge shape layers? Layer > Combine Shape > choose option and optionally followed by Combine Shape Components should work fine.

Selecting several Shape Layers in the Layers Panel and hitting cmd-E (Layer > Merge Shapes) also seems to work out fine for me.

[Stephen Marsh]

Despite all the vector bells and whistles, Photoshop is still a raster program at heart. There is a canvas in Photoshop, that has a specific pixel width and height, colour mode, channels etc. All this creates a greater file size than the pure vector exports that are a smaller size.

[Kenneth Kawamoto]

Photoshop requires me to rasterize the SVG file upon opening it

You can place the SVG (or open the SVG in AI, then copy & paste) - this will create a Smart Object that contains the vector data