Why are my Adobe Illustrator files so large?

[Cagey Drifter]

I'm making a page that has a simple design. I'm placing an image that is 400kb into it. But when I save it, it ends up as 20mb! Why is it doing this, and how can I avoid it?

[groman]

I don't know details of the Adobe Illustrator format, but I do not think that such behavior is unreasonable. Nobody claims that a vector illustration program is supposed to generate size-efficient files. A 400KB raster image might be interpolated by illustrator into a 1200DPI monster and saved uncompressed for all you know, for which 20MB is very reasonable.

Any particular reason you want to avoid this behavior?

[Cagey Drifter]

I want to send the Illustrator file to someone else. Also it takes up a lot of room!

[Gaudere]

The file is getting big becuase you are probably saving it in a high resolution or with a lot of unneeded information. Is this a vector-based image? If so, save it as a .pdf with "preserve illustrator editing capabilities" unchecked. If this is a bitmap-based image, use export or "save for web" and save it as a .gif (low-resolution, low file size), jpg (low or high resolution, depending on your settings, medium file size) or .tif (generally high resolution, high file size).

The format that will be best and the smallest file size depends on what the recipient is going to be using it for. What is it and what're they going to do with it?

[DougC]

- - - The rasterized image is huge probably because your artboard setting is huge. When you open Illustrator and create a new image, switch the artboard dimension measurement to pixels and what does it say the height x width is in pixels?
- To shrink your vector image, try selecting all of your vector image in Illustrator, and then "shrink it down" by holding the shift key and dragging so it appears to get smaller. Also, save as gif or convert, outside of Illustrator. ...You really want screen resolutions to keep the image file size small, gifs at 800 x 600 are good.
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[JimMacMillan]

I am basing the followiing on my PageMaker experience. So your app may not do this.

Are you doing a mini save or a full save? a mini save adds changes to the file which in turn causes it to grow. A full save replaces the file with the most recent version. Of course with a full save you will have nothing to revert back to.

[Chairman Pow]

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- To shrink your vector image, try selecting all of your vector image in Illustrator, and then "shrink it down" by holding the shift key and dragging so it appears to get smaller. Also, save as gif or convert, outside of Illustrator. ...You really want screen resolutions to keep the image file size small, gifs at 800 x 600 are good.
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Are you suggesting that you can decrease the file size by making the vector elements in the file "physically" smaller, or am I completely misreading this?

As for the OP, try linking to the image instead of pasting it into the file.