I am working on a poster in Inkscape that is using a lot of photographs which are then put inside clipping masks to fit with the composition. I have been imported about 20 images (out of 30) so far and for each one I have resized them (paste size) and then used object ->clip->set to prepare them for the composition. 90% of the images were imported as links rather than embedded so as to keep the file size down. The file size sits at under 9mb at the moment. Inkscape is using about 1 gb of ram and the memory of my work computer is near peaking (my home computer has 32gb of ram, but my work computer only has 2.669). I want to get the work done at work and assume it will be difficult to share the file to my home computer too, since most the files are not embedded and even if I copied the linked pictures the locations would be different.

After this point, I get error messages when importing subsequent photos saying "failed to import image" or, after I successfully import an image in some cases, it crashes when I try to copy another image (to copy the size for paste size).

I assume this is an issue related to RAM.

Does anyone have any tips? How can I optimize with minimal effects to my project? Ideally I would be able to release those images from their clipping masks in case I need to recompose them later.

OK, so one thing I tried but didn't help much, was to hide a layer with most of the photos, but this did not free up much ram.

I am now thinking I need to rasterize those clipped images to get rid of the parts of the images behind the mask. Any way to do this without exporting the images?

BTW I am a teacher and this is a poster that contains photos of staff (it is for a school singing competition), that is why it requires 30 photographs. It will be printed very large, so I will need to keep the quality up somehow.

On a related issue, can you have images hidden when working but that still render when you export them? I was surprised that hiding that layer didn't reduce much of the RAM overhead, but if I could get that to work then being able have images hidden during editing but visible in renders would help to solve this issue.

Found a workaround that has massively reduced the burden on my ram but probably made a few sacrifices as a result.
I clicked on each of the clipped photographs and clicked edit -> Make a bitmap copy
I then deleted the original clipped images.
With each deleted image ram usage went down significantly.
Afterward I tried to add a new image to the composition and I did not have any errors. Hopefully it should be smooth sailing from here on out.

The only potential problem I see with that solution, is a potential reduction in quality of the original raster image. If you don't see a change in the quality, that's awesome! I would expect a slight blurriness. But if they started out very high quality, it might not be noticable.

One thing that would not risk a reduction in quality, would be to use a raster editor to crop them, before importing into Inkscape.

In the Preferences dialog, you can set the resolution of the bitmap copy. I'd make sure that's between 300-600 dpi before using the bitmap copy operations.

(edit: corrected typo)

Also make sure you're using the latest Inkscape version (0.92.3) - some previous versions had a problem with importing different file types on Windows.

Oh, and don't *upgrade*. Uninstall, then install the new version.

tylerdurden wrote:In the Preferences dialog, you can set the resolution of the bitmap copy. I'd make sure that's between 300-600 dpi before using the bitmap copy operations.

(edit: corrected typo)

This is a very useful tip. I will check that out tomorrow. Thanks!

Compromises can be made when composing for large format print on an under-powered machine.

Depending on the location of the poster/banner, the resolution could be 300dpi (or less) and reduce the filesize dramatically... the distance of the viewers to the printed work is the main criteria for setting resolution.

"It's not always 300dpi... The ideal resolution (dpi) of your artwork depends mostly on how far away the artwork is from the viewer. "
http://resources.printhandbook.com/page ... inting.php

TD