I’m contemplating creating a document that includes many photos. I’d appreciate pointers on the best way to do this. I can imagine:
a) Inserting the Images into the text which I assume pulls them into the Scrivner files. I’d think this might slow Scrivner down
b) Putting the images in a folder(s) and generating links to the images.
c) Putting the images online and inserting them as links that way
Is there any guidance on the best way to accomplish this? Links to relevant sites/posts/topics would be fine.
FWIW - My goal is to produce an eBook from Scrivner and probably also a printed document using a publishing program.
As is probably evident I"m a newbie to Scrivner.
I’m not sure if I’ve completely understood–ultimately, do you want the images inserted in the ebook, or do you want links to the images that require users to view them on a webpage? If the latter, then your option C is what you’d want, creating hyperlinks in the editor to the images online. For the former, you’ll need the images in the documents when you compile, but there are a couple things you could do to get around slowing things down while working. First, you can wait to insert the images until you’ve finished writing, just using placeholder notes to yourself in the meanwhile. By importing the images into the binder, rather than inserting them into the text, you can load them separately in the split editor so you can reference them while you’re drafting the document; once you’re ready, you can drag the image from the binder into the document to insert it. Until it’s inserted, it’s not saved in the RTF file but is just a distinct file among all the files in your project, so it won’t affect working in the text file.
Another option is to use a placeholder image in the text, like a thumbnail, that will give you a visual clue about what’s going there but won’t put a strain on the editor. If you have a lot of images all in the same document or need to see them at a better resolution in order to write about them, that may not help as much. Keep in mind though that you can split documents into small sections, since you can stitch them back together during compile, so with judicious splitting you may avoid trying to load too many images at once.
Finally, the next update will have a feature that allows you to link to an external image, displaying the image in the document without embedding it. This lets you edit the image or swap it out easily, so it’s a useful shortcut for the placeholder option above–you can use a thumbnail version while you’re working, and then when you’re finished and ready to compile, replace that group of external image files with the full versions at the same file path. When Scrivener compiles the documents, it will insert the image found at that location. Note though that although this feature will let you work without embedding the images in the RTF files, since it does still render the images in the editor, you could still see slowdown with it if you have a lot of big images.
Many thanks for the clear response.
Since I do want the images in the final document I think I’ll experiment with the small sections for now.
Is there a timetable for releases and/or updates?
Jim Mitchell
Wonderful explanation mimeticmouton, thank you. 
Are the “placeholder notes to yourself” you mention just small unlikely strings that are easy to find & replace later, (.##. , .##.img1 ,etc…) or is there a more elaborate option that scrivener offers?
Yes, for placeholder notes, I’d just use a text note with special formatting or a unique text code so they’re easy to find after compiling, e.g. set them in a particular text colour or add something like ##IMG: to the beginning of the line followed by the image name or whatever other information you need to identify for yourself the image you want. Then after compiling, you can search for text of that colour (you’d need to be sure no to remove colours when compiling; there’s an option for this under the Transformations tab) or search for the ##IMG string and replace the text with the images one by one.
The fancier method would be using the placeholder images via the linked images option that will come with 1.5.9. These will be embedded in the compiled document, so you’d just need to replace the linked external image with the final version of the file before compiling your manuscript.
We’re working on tying up the last couple loose ends in 1.5.9 and will have that out within the next few days.
Thank you mimeticmouton.
I realize now that I got mixed up with the windows forum; would the process described be the same on the Mac?
All of that will work on a Mac, which already has the linked image option. There’s a more complicated scheme you can use on the Mac to replace a text string with the image during compile; for more info on that, I’ll refer you to section 15.5.4, “Image Placeholder Tags”, of the user manual.
Excellent, thank you mimeticmouton