Hi Folks! Recently I added Michael, Vicki's Clothing Pack 1, a couple of other nifty Poser things to my Runtime folder, and noticed a few days later that it has ballooned to over 600MB. Now I'm about to add the FF and SF Hair figures that I've just obtained from DAZ. This has probably been discussed already, but can someone please post again or tell me where to find the information about any utilities or shareware for the Mac that deal with keeping the Runtime folder manageable--or create auxiliary folders? Thanx Peter (Dr Zik)

Unfortunately there isn't much. I used MartinC's equivilent of Morph Manager to combine any extra morphs into one super figure so I could delete the extra figures's ... I saved space overall though that one file is pretty big. Unfortunately Poser tends to be pretty swollen. My poser directory is about 1.2 Gig.

I'm not sure what you can do either, although I'm not sure if it really make much of a difference. My Runtime folder is around 1.5 GB, and growing all the time. It hasn't been a problem (other than overall disk space).

If you hard drive is formatted with HFS extended and NOT Mac OS standard file will take up half of the space they do under Mac OS standard other than that there is no real way to have a alot of poser Bloatware in your runtime folder and not have it consume huge amounts of space.

Onr thing is if you never use alot of the junk installed with the original poser install then delete the files. Like the low-ress figures. Folders like "Poser 2 Hi", "Poser 2 Lo", and "Poser 4 Lo". "Characters- Female" and "Characters- Male" whick are over 20 megs each but really are all the same figures. The Poser Install should have had a customize feature! What if I deleted a geometry file for a figure and all I want is to install that file to use? I have to install the whole thing again! If you dont need it, delete it. Just be sure not to delete stuff out of the Geometries folder that you might need for a character you wish to keep to work(probly shouldnt delete anything from the Geometries folder). By the way, my runtime folder is over 2 gigs! Poser Macinstaller has options for an Extra Runtime that items can be installed into but I never could figure it out. Either way the files are still takeing up space, they're just somewhere else on the drive.

Deleting the files you will probably never use is indeed a way to deflate the Runtime folder. I've trashed the robots and animals, for example. There are lots of poses you can trash as well. Storing textures as JPEGs rather than PICTs saves some space (at the expense of speed when they are decompressed to use).

I don't think having the folder too big impinges on the performance of Poser on a Mac or PC at all. Biggest problem with performance is from fragmented files, and one sore spot on Macs is you have to by something like Norton Utilities to do what Window users can do for free. Best way to keep from fragmaenting a drive is never delete anything, incidently!

One thing you can do is to store all additional textures for new characters and props in a seaprate file structure than in Runtime. I store all non-original Poser textures on an external HD in Poser/Runtime2. Texture files can be big and add up. If you need to delete non-essential Poser characters from the Library, save as a PZ3 file and store outside of Poser/Runtime.. I save a new character in its own folder with all textures, etc. elswhere and retreive it when wanted. Periodically burn a CD of your Geometries folder. My own Runtime folder is about 1.5 GB and my Other Poser folder is almost 5 GB. All in all having stuffed all this Poser stuff here and there, does not seem to disrupt performance on my Mac G4.

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The only Mac tool that might reduce the problem indeed is Macinstaller, although it can't help the fact that the files *must* be somewhere, as stated above... Some people got a bit confused by it (sorry for that...), mainly because of a simple misunderstanding - it will *not* modify/extract your existing Runtime, it only ever affects new installings done with it *afterwards*. In other words: If your Runtime already is big, crowded and chaotic then it won't help you much, but if you ever start from scratch with a clean Poser install, you may consider using it. It basically offers two alternatives to classic Runtime: 1) You can install into a new ExtraRuntime folder, which keeps your custom files and Poser's default ones completely separate. Pro: You only have one single folder with all your add-ons, and re-installing Poser becomes a 1 minute task - I personally couldn't live without this. Con: If you have 5 gigs of custom files, you will get a 5 gig ExtraRuntime folder. 2) You can set Macinstaller to *leave* all files at their source locations, even across various volumes and disks if you like. Pro: You can distribute your file sizes across disks. Con: If you ever re-install Poser you are back to manual re-installing of all custom files just like you've been if you put everything into Runtime. If you have any specific problems with Macinstaller, please don't hesitate to contact me directly. Cheers, MartinC

If you're running Poser for a number of jobs, you might want to consider setting up a series of RunTime folders on separate Zip drives, then using those as each job demands. I've been using this method for about six months now, and it's kept RunTime very managable.