URGENT | Need to delete items from project store

That doesn’t seem right. Has it been reported as an issue?

Yes, with a first reply of:

As for your question, I’d recommend that you take a look at our ‘Optimizing your experience’ article here, going over how to remove assets from your library and other methods of reducing bloat.

However, this is worthless to this issue as it will only add more data that is being kept around and unused. For example, in the article it shows you how to use the image properties to make a smaller file, but unknown to the user both files are kept. So if you have a 10MB image that you use Image Properties to optimize down to 2MB, a normal person would assume that the 2MB shown in the Final Download Size tool is correct. However, in reality you increased your file size usage by 2MB to 12MB instead of reducing it by 8MB to 2MB. Then there is the issue that the file size reported after Publishing comes from the Final Download Size tool, not the actual size of what is uploaded. Even worse is if you instead replace the 10MB image with a 5MB image, and then replace that with a 2MB image your upload size is now 17MB not 2MB.

I just tested and verified what I noted above. Anything ever added into the Media Library will always be uploaded, but does not show in the Approx. Size or Final Download Size. Even if you replace or delete it from the Media Library it will still be uploaded.

24 hours later after I told them I was going to have to manually fix this issue they responded with:

Sorry for the inconvenience regarding your project’s size.

We’ve been able to compress (crush) your project ZPP down to 63MB using a method which we hope to make available via ZapWorks in the future to help clean projects, which should ensure faster publishing times for you.

A quick look at the zpp they sent and they did what I outlined here. I seriously hope this comes as a standalone tool ASAP and not as a 7.x feature.

-Eric

Well, that sure explains why it takes longer than expected to upload my project which is less than a megabyte download size. :neutral_face:

Scary part is that is not the real download size for the app. Go to the Project Overview on the website, in the Publish Log area click on SEE ALL LOG ENTRIES, and press DOWNLOAD on the item at the top of the list. That is the real download size for the project.

-Eric

What the… Holy!@#$! It’s actually 8 times bigger than ZapWorks studio says it is! This has got to be a bug!

So I’ve been following all the rules and guidelines to no avail???!!! I’m absolutely dumbfounded as to why this hasn’t been fixed. So I guess I need to learn how to squander my time manually optimizing the download size? Where is this process documented? This is complete nonsense.

For anyone stumbling upon this thread, my concerns were completely unjustified and based on erroneous information. Please see this post by @simon, which sets the record straight.

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Where are these files and folders located? Where is this manual “clean-up” process documented?

EDIT

Still being somewhat new to ZapWorks, I hope I’m missing something here; but all this time, I thought users were downloading less than a megabyte over the cell network. If I understand this thread, though, it seems they’ve actually been downloading about 8 times that. (That’s the scale of the discrepancy between what ZapWorks Studio reports and the size of the ZPP file in my account’s upload log.)

Do I understand correctly?

For anyone stumbling upon this thread, my concerns were completely unjustified and based on erroneous information. Please see this post by @simon, which sets the record straight.

Correct, the .zpp file you downloaded is what is downloaded and unpacked during the scan “unlocking”.

The path is the first line in my instructions in this thread. For Windows the location of your projects is %userprofile%\.zapparstudio\

Thanks. Is there any reason the clean-up process you describe couldn’t be done on an exported (or downloaded) copy of the project so as not to muck with the commit history etc?

And for Mac, it’s at ~/.zapparstudio. (The tilde means the user’s home directory - e.g. Users/jane - and the period at the beginning of the file name means it’s a hidden directory, so you won’t see it in a “normal” Finder listing.)

Sure just an added step to go that route. The .zpp appears to be a zip copy of the project, so duplicate the folder and save the time downloading and unpacking.

Part of the reason they keep all of the files is they are needed for the commit history. If you are deleting items from the store the commit history will fail to load if a file is missing.

Thanks. I just recently posted a question asking how to delete commits. I don’t need the entire history. It grows too rapidly and sucks up too much storage on my backup drive.

Do you know if there’s a way to selectively delete commits?

The commits are just the dated .json files in the project root. The commit files are small and it is the referenced asset files in the “store” folder that hold all the data. You would have to manually review .json files to figure out what you need to keep.

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I see. Thanks for the insight.

No need to download. Just export, change the extension from ZPP to ZIP, and double click.

That’s an interesting response from Zappar support, since for me, it’s the user experience that matters most. I’m using WebAR, so download time is critical, and as it stands, the “final download size” provided by Studio is wildly inaccurate. In fact, I really feel like I’ve been duped.

I did some tinkering this weekend while exploring an automated solution for optimizing Zappar project files, and I made a puzzling discovery. If I export a project, unzip it, zip it back up without modifying anything, and then try to import it, Zappar doesn’t recognize it as a valid project file. :confused:

There seems to be something special about the way the project folder is compressed. @George, can you or anyone at Zappar shed any light on this?

Ideally, I’d like to export a project, optimize it, and then re-import it without messing around in the hidden projects folder.

You are making it too complicated. I told you to just duplicate folder. Any folder in the .zapparstudio folder will show up as a project to load. So duplicate the folder and it is the same as exporting and importing it.

Yes, it will show up, but it won’t necessarily load.

No, it is not the same. For one thing, an exported project does not have a “models” folder containing the 3D assets in their native format.

And yes, I saw and understood your recommendation. As I said, I’m looking to go about it a slightly different way. It might not be possible, but I’m still exploring. I’ll just start a new thread if I have further thoughts to share. Didn’t mean to hijack yours.

Hi guys,

Apologies for the inconvenience this has caused for the both of you.

We’ve been able to push an update yesterday to the ZapWorks CLI; a ZPP cleaner.

It’s part of our ZapWorks command-line tools. You can find documentation on the tool here. Once you have the tool installed following the ‘Getting Started’ section in the article, you can run the following command in your terminal:

zapworks zppclean MyProject.zpp

It will then produce a cleaned version of your project, called MyProject_cleaned.zpp. This will help remove any unnecessary hidden files and commit history from your project, however, this does not perform any optimizations to your project, of which you’ll best be served by reading our ‘Optimizing your experience’ article here.

We’re working on documenting this tool within the next couple of weeks to help both you and other users with this issue.

We hope this helps you, and please get in touch with support if you have any urgent issues.

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Wow! Thanks, @Bob. I can’t wait to give it a try. :grinning:

Hey @Bob, can you clarify something? Must the project reside in the official hidden Zappar folder, or can the project name supplied as a command line argument be the path to an exported ZPP file?

EDIT: I just tried this out, and it works great on an exported ZPP project file. The resulting ZPP file is still twice the “download size” that Studio reports, but it’s less than 1/3 the pre-cleaned size. :+1:

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