I maintain several huge map files. I'm pretty sure they each have over 200 layers. I know that seems ridiculous, but this is something I came up with to help be more efficient. It's a very organized file with all layers being in alphabetical order and also grouped according to street name, retailer, restaurants and traffic. We previously had 4 separate maps to show these facts on but doing those over and over and over for every client seemed really inefficient. So I consolidated the data and information into one map for each city. It illustrates retailers, traffic, restaurants and street names over the span of 100-800 square miles in each one. I've completed these for just about every city with over 50,000 people in Louisiana. I've invested an incredible amount of time into these.

I never really need the entirety of the maps. It just speeds up my workflow to have one big map that I can pull into InDesign and move around my content box to the location that I need. I generally use the flattened version of the maps for this purpose.

Sometimes, I need to edit a portion of the map in photoshop. For example, if I'm working on a map that I need to see some land on but I have a retailers logo over that piece of land, then I'll need to go find that layer and move the retailers name to a different spot. This is pretty easy because the layers are so organized. My problem is that after I've cropped my file during these edits, I can't figure out how to delete the layers that are technically still turned on but are no longer on the image. It's different than "Discard Hidden Layers" because the layers aren't hidden.

Anybody know how to discard layers that are turned on but cropped out?