Too many pieces after tracing bitmap image, bogging document down, can't find a solution.

Hey everyone,

We use watercolor images for printing on products (mugs, bags, etc.) While creating the designs, I imported png watercolor images that needed to be traced, so that I can change some parts. In order to keep the watercolor "look", I had to keep the detail slider pretty high when tracing, or else the images lose a lot of color dimension. The problem now is that each watercolor flower bunch is now made up of at least a thousand small individual pieces/curves.

The document holding all of these images is running very slow, and there is about a 2 second lag when dragging a floral graphic across the screen, and a big delay when scrolling in and out of the workspace. I've been trying to figure out how to make these images take up less space so that the document runs smoothly. Does anyone know how to do that? I've attached photos to show the document that I'm working in, along with a closeup of one of the floral graphics after using Power Trace. I've tried to ungroup the flowers, grab all the pieces and Combine under the shaping menu, but everytime, I just get the hourglass and eventually have to close the program and restart Corel.

Is there a way to "join" all of these pieces back into one object that might be more simplified that doesn't slow down Corel?

Thank you in advance!! [:D]

Charissa