I have ~1100 games in my Steam library. Due to Valves changes to the the orientation of the library images, a lot of games were left with ugly landscape images blurred to fill out the new portrait style, so I've taken quite a bit of care to curate my library so that all games have full proper artwork using the amazing SteamgridDB website. If you like to curate and customize your library and somehow don't know about that site, it is an essential resource, and I suggest checking it out.
However, many of the images on that site are extremely (needlessly) large and take up a lot of space.. and as you can guess, either slow Steam down as you scroll, and/or take some time to load in. My library was getting pretty slow/laggy as I scrolled through it, so I decided to see what I could do about it.
Steam caches original and custom artworks in these locations:
Original - "Steam/appcache/librarycache"
Custom - "Steam/userdata/_number_/config/grid"
The original artworks are predicably small... but they can be smaller! Files that you download from SteamgridDB can be MUCH smaller. So using Kraken.io (online image compressor) I optimized the images with an almost imperceptible reduction in quality.
Here's what I came out with:
Artwork before optimization = 1549MB
Atrwork after optimization = 618MB
----
A 60.1% reduction in filesize. Nice.
The resulting effect is that Steam feels more responsive, scrolls smoother and loads images more quickly so fade in is non existent at typical scrolling speeds.. as it should.
The nice thing is that you can make a copy of both folders and store them somewhere so if you decide to format your drive and reinstall Steam, you can just copy them back and overwrite the originals and you're good to go again.
However, many of the images on that site are extremely (needlessly) large and take up a lot of space.. and as you can guess, either slow Steam down as you scroll, and/or take some time to load in. My library was getting pretty slow/laggy as I scrolled through it, so I decided to see what I could do about it.
Steam caches original and custom artworks in these locations:
Original - "Steam/appcache/librarycache"
Custom - "Steam/userdata/_number_/config/grid"
The original artworks are predicably small... but they can be smaller! Files that you download from SteamgridDB can be MUCH smaller. So using Kraken.io (online image compressor) I optimized the images with an almost imperceptible reduction in quality.
Here's what I came out with:
Artwork before optimization = 1549MB
Atrwork after optimization = 618MB
----
A 60.1% reduction in filesize. Nice.
The resulting effect is that Steam feels more responsive, scrolls smoother and loads images more quickly so fade in is non existent at typical scrolling speeds.. as it should.
The nice thing is that you can make a copy of both folders and store them somewhere so if you decide to format your drive and reinstall Steam, you can just copy them back and overwrite the originals and you're good to go again.
