Quick Tip – Optimising the Photoshop Plug-ins Folder for Web Design

Photoshop has grown from a photo scanning and correction application into a versatile program capable of working with digital imagery in almost any context. It can now import and manipulate video, 3D models, and perform scientific measurements and analyses of image data.

This breadth has allowed Adobe to maintain market share with their flagship product, but has resulted in a monster of an application that can be a huge drain on your computer’s resources. If using Photoshop exclusively for web design, and perhaps the odd bit of print design, we will probably not need every available feature that the program offers. So, can we turn the ones we don’t want off? Will doing so make any difference? The answer is on both counts is “well yes… kind of”. This post will show you how. The examples refer to CS4 on a Mac, but the principle should apply to any version of Photoshop on either Windows or OS X

1. Create a ‘Disabled Plug-ins’ Folder

Photoshop was one of the first applications to pioneer the concept of “plug-in” architecture, allowing  additional functionality to be abstracted out from the main program core. This not only enables third-party developers to extend what is possible in Photoshop with their own plug-ins, but it means that some default functions can be disabled by removing the plug-ins that are pre-installed.

In the main Photoshop directory,  you will find the ‘Plug-ins’ folder, which contains all of the plug-ins that come pre-installed, plus any extras that may have been added either by yourself or by third-party installers. Simply deleting some of the contents of this is inadvisable, so we will add a new folder, and name it ‘Disabled Plug-ins’.

It is then possible to move unwanted plug-ins from the default ‘Plug-ins’ folder to the new ‘Disabled…’ folder. Then, when Photoshop launches, it will only load the remaining plug-ins and ignore anything placed in ‘disabled…’ Using this method should not damage or cause bugs in Photoshop in any way. If you do experience any problems, or need to return the functionality of any disabled plug-ins, simply move them back to the original ‘plug-ins’ folder.

2. Move Unwanted Plug-ins to Disabled Folder

Here is a screen grab of my disabled plug-ins folder:

The red folders relate to 3D and scientific functions that I know I will never need to use for web design. These folders can be disabled in their entirety. Annoyingly, the ‘video layers’ function appears to be baked right into the Photoshop core – there are no plug-ins for this, so we cannot remove it. Bah!

The orange ‘Effects’ folder contains the plug-in for the filter gallery. This contains tools for making a photo look like it has been drawn with charcoal, wrapped in plastic, and many more arguably pointless special effects that I personally don’t find much use for. Occasionally some of these tools do prove useful however, so they may want to leave this alone, but before you do, bear in mind that this single plug-in is 12MB in size!

The remaining ‘File Formats’, ‘Filters’ and ‘Import-Export’ folders need to be created manually because we will selectively disable plug-ins from the original directory.

3. File Formats

The file format plug-ins I disabled are shown below:

These all relate to non-web based and often quite obscure digital image formats. Left behind were: GIF, PNG, BMP and WBMP (just in case I have some old Windows image files from clients that need to be converted).

4. Filters

The filter plug-ins I have disabled are:

These relate specifically to working with video, so aren’t really needed. The exception here may be ‘De-interlace’, if your website required you to work with screen-captures from interlaced video formats.

5. Import-Export

Again, the FireWire Export plug-in is video-related, and allows you to preview your Photoshop file on a TV monitor using a FireWire connection, for colour-correction purposes. This isn’t needed for web design, so can be safely disabled.

On-Disk Savings

The total size of the disabled plug-ins folder comes to just over 70MB.

Results

So does this make any real difference to the performance of Photoshop? If you are running the latest multi-core system with GBs of RAM and huge hard-drives, then you probably won’t notice much. On lower-end machines with limited RAM and scratch-disk space then it has more appeal.

I monitored the system performance on a 2GHz Dual-Core MacBook with an 80GB HDD and a measly 1GB of RAM. The results are below:

Total System Memory Usage – All Plug-ins, 25MB Document:

Total System Memory Usage – With Plug-ins Disabled, 25MB Document:

Total System Memory Usage – All Plug-ins, 100MB Document:

Total System Memory Usage – With Plug-ins Disabled, 100MB Document:

RAM/Scratch Disk Usage – All Plug-ins, 100MB Document:

RAM/Scratch Disk Usage – Plug-ins Disabled, 100MB Document:

RAM/Scratch Disk Usage – All Plug-ins, 25MB Document:

RAM/Scratch Disk Usage – Plug-ins Disabled, 25MB Document:

RSIZE refers to the Real RAM Usage, whereas VSIZE refers to Virtual RAM or scratch disks, where the application begins writing to a hard disk when the available RAM gets too low.

Analysis

The differences aren’t staggering. With the 100MB document there is at the most an 8MB saving of RAM usage, plus a similar amount on the scratch disk, making about 15-16MB saving in total. This does appear proportionate to the size of the image, suggesting greater savings could be made when working with even larger documents.

There seems to be a greater impact on the system as whole, due to the way that the operating system allocates RAM resources, and more data swapping between RAM and the scratch disk occurs when all the plug-ins are enabled, which does have quite an impact on performance.

Why is it not more? It is possible that some of the functions – such as the filter gallery or 3D tools, are only fully loaded when activated by the user. Therefore if you never use these tools, it may not make a great deal of difference if the plug-ins are disabled or not.

Since I am not entirely sure which of the disabled plug-ins cause the savings, and which don’t, I’m going to leave them as they are, as I still don’t need them. Photoshop seems to launch a bit quicker too, so I think the exercise is well worth considering.