Size of photos

[Shari]

This is going to sound really dumb for someone that has been around for a while - but there are some things I just do not understand. My computer has been freezing - mainly when I click on a URL in an e-mail (I have been told there are probably programmes running in the background and since I don't know how to deal with that I will have to call our tech). BUT - I decided today to clear our a lot of photos from this past year that I had saved in tags and collections but really don't need. I decided to look in the recycle bin just to see how much I had deleted. I have some files in there that are PSD that are 52,444 kb more or less. The majority of them are jpeg files that are 1.40 (approx) MB. Why is this? Should I be saving these photos in a certain format? It is all a bit confusing. Maybe it does not even matter. Can anyone explain please. Thanks.
Shari

[TonyW]

Shari: When you save as a PSD file you're saving all the layers separately with no compression. That's why they're big. JPEGS are flattened (no layers) and compressed so are much smaller.

If you want to work on an image later then save them as PSD's. If you're done with it save it as a JPEG. That said I hate deleting stuff and my hard disk is full of huge psd files that I'll likely never open again - but you never know (just had one today that I wished I'd saved the psd file as I needed to edit the text and had to clone out the old text on the jpeg instead)

Tony

[Shari]

Thanks again Tony. I'm slowly learning.
Shari