Oh my gosh! Ive run into the most annoying thing!! im trying to import maybe 50-100 jpg files into a fresh project and Unity is taking absolutely forever!! its beyond a joke! i initially was importing just on a 1000 images and it has taken all day just to do half of them!! Unity has become unusable! the thing is, it only does this when swapping over to build for iOS in the publish settings… why is this?
cheers
The main reason is a PVRTexTool which uses a pretty sophisticated compression algorithm (and gives really good compression). Also a compression quality (in the texture import settings) could be your problem. If you have set it to High - it will greatly increase the time to compress image (around 2 times). So one need to be very careful to set it to large number of images. Also setting to Low will help you to decrease the compression time around 2 times too. And in some cases the quality of the resulting image will be acceptable despite of the artifacts.
I’m importing 8k textures and had 5-10min load times, so I switched the format to Alpha 8 (which has no compression) and since I’m importing into an 8k texture there should be no resizing. So what in the world is taking 15 minutes? The entire system is not optimized for textures above 4k.
You must also consider external processes that may be slowing Unity down. Very commonly the virus scanner. It’s been reported over and over and over again that excluding your project folder(s) from antivirus “live” or “online” scans can give you a significant boost.
You’ll normally only notice how much a virus scanner is slowing down operations until you run an operation over many files, including things like “delete Library”. Doing so can literally take ten times longer (and more!) with an active virus scanner monitoring all those tiny files getting created and modified.
And then of course the system specs, eg HDD vs SSD, 8 GiB vs 16+ GiB memory, mobile vs desktop CPU - those can make operations go faster/slower by several factors.