Allen-Bradley RSView ME Image Bloat

We have developed RSView ME projects. When similar projects are encountered the practice of those designing the screens has been to copy the earlier project and modify as needed. However this has often meant adding different images.

Apparently the previous, now unused, images are still contained in the project folders. This wouldn't be that bad but they are also included into the .MER file which is sent to the display. This has resulted in .MER files too large to be run - or at least they trip a warning.

Is there an easy way to identify which images are actually being used in a project so as to identify and eliminate the unused images?

Thanks for the heads up on the "sticky" images. I've always opened 2 instances of Studio then copy/paste what I want from the existing project to the new project. Probably not as fast as editing an existing project but you come out of it a lot cleaner.

That sounds great. Unfortunately, I'm just the guy who has to deal with the result.

I found that in the project, on right clicking 'Displays' I can export all the displays properties to XML files. I exported these to a directory with the project name.

On analysis I found that each entry in the XML files that I'm interested in has "imageName" followed by a non-empty pair of quotes containing the name. Many items can have images but may not in the application. These have an empty pair of quotes ("").

Then I wrote a VB application (still very crude) that searches for and extracts these image information fragments and writes them to a chosen text file. So at least I have a listing of the images which are actually in the displays. I'll be able to use this to weed the 'Images' directory.

As a follow-up on this thread I have posted my BASIC program for extracting a list of used images in an RSViewME project (this hasn't been tested with other flavors of RSView). It's at

RSViewME Image Lister