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Could someone please help me to understand and how to get this done correctly as i have tried multiple times but it has not worked. These files are to be uploaded to my site as artwork for printing. It will need to be in RBG profile.

I have .EPS / AI files of the design and I need them to be in both .svg and .png formats. The issues I encountered with .svg is that when I exported them as .svg, the file was so large with most at 1.3MB and some are even 5-10MB. I have tried to change different CSS properties from presentation attributes ( best quality but large file) to style elements ( size became smaller but their colours weren't right to some of the artwork) .

  • I have chosen embedded images instead of link and wonder if choosing liking will reduce the size ( images are placed in folders in hard drive). Decimal point was 3
  • should I choose to preserve illustrator editing capabilities?
  • tick or until output fewer elements? Or use Element for text or path?

Also I have read people chose to rasterize their image and export as an .svg. This way did reduce a bit of the size but my concern is if I scale it up / down and print it out, would it get pixelated? Some said to avoid this way.

Also, some mentioned they did flattening transparency to help reduce the sizing. Again, would this affect the quality when the design scaled up/ down?

I am so confused of the settings and worried if I do something incorrectly my printout will be thrown away. Can someone shed me a light and guide me through this please? I have looked up YouTube and read on different forums but have not found anything applicable in my case. I really appreciate your help. Thank you

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  • Are you including a JPG, PNG, or other raster images in your SVG file? You may have to reduce your linked content to reduce the file size. Not sure what you are doing but a 10mb file is not very large. What is your end goal with the SVG/artwork?
    – AndrewH
    Commented Apr 2 at 17:51
  • You are not really describing your problem really well. Your describing your symptoms, though, why 10Mb is large i dont know? So all we can do is speculate.
    – joojaa
    Commented Apr 3 at 1:40
  • Hi AndrewH and Joojaa: The files come in .EPS format and I believe some elements are images. I upload these files through a third party app on my online site to display on products, then to be printed out either through sublimation or DTF. The apps people suspect the sizing causing issues, as anything larger than 5-7Mb take a long time to load. If they are more than 7MB the site then crashed. That was why I thought I must have done something wrong with the setting when exporting it.
    – Lavenderparis19
    Commented Apr 3 at 8:49
  • Plus, I was hesistant changing anything in the setting as I do not know how the printout will be like, and def I dont want the quality to be affected.
    – Lavenderparis19
    Commented Apr 3 at 8:51

1 Answer 1

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If you have embedded images, that is most likely the problem. In SVGs, embedded raster images are still raster images, not vectors. The size of the raster image will be the limiting factor here.

You probably need to open the raster image in a raster editor such as Photoshop, then export as JPEG so you can add a bit more compression to get the file size smaller, or even resample the image to make it smaller (lower resolution), or a combination of both. Then embed the image in Illustrator, and export as SVG.

If you choose to preserve Illustrator editing abilities, that will make the file size even bigger as it will also embed the whole illustrator document inside the SVG.

If you choose to link image files instead of embedding, then you will have to also upload the linked image files somewhere if anybody else opening the file is to see them. So, that probably isn't practical.

One more thing to note, SVG might not be the best format for what you are trying to do. Might be better to export as PDF, since it is designed specifically for print. Also with Illustrator, you can choose the amount of compression to add and also include resampling to reduce image sizes when exporting PDFs from within the PDF export dialog.

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  • Hi Billy, thank you for your detailed reply. I agreed with you about what you have said. I need to keep in mind these factors when I come to print using dpf files. The app I use atm doesnt allow pdf unfortunately. For svg, would rasterization affect the quality of the design? I have read a bit about whether using rasterization or flattening transparency and I am still quite confused. The ideal design would need to be 4200x4800px with 300dpi for PNG , that was why I thought if I have an svg file, I would not need to worry too much about the sizing
    – Lavenderparis19
    Commented Apr 3 at 9:00
  • Where can I get to learn more about the ins and outs of this if you dont mind me asking? I am still learning design so my knowledge is very limited.
    – Lavenderparis19
    Commented Apr 3 at 9:02
  • Rasterization won't work as images are already raster. Flattening only works for vectors, not raster images, but it's unlikely to make much difference in file size. The best free source of learning is probably tutorials on youtube.
    – Billy Kerr
    Commented Apr 3 at 10:06
  • Thank you Billy!
    – Lavenderparis19
    Commented Apr 3 at 14:13

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