Is there anyway to compress images within a Scrivener project?
I was doing some image scouting, dragged a few images of people and places into my project, and then noticed my project had increased in size by 18mb!
I opened up the project file and noticed that the size of some of the images I had dragged in were a tad on the large size, one alone was 1.9mb, with a resolution of over 2000x2000. Another was an uncompressed .bmp
I dragged the images out of the project and ran a batch Photoshop action to limit their resolution to 800 on the longest side, and then saved them all as jpg’s with 50% compression. Size and quality that is more than enough for my reference material. The total size of the images were now under 1mb. I dragged the images back into my project and deleted the old ones. The project size is now much better.
I noticed that you can set the view size of an image, but I couldn’t find a way to fix that size.
If there isn’t a way then it would be nice to be able to ‘compress’ the image on the Image Tool window. Or even have a setting to auto compress and size limit during import.
Until then I’ll have to remember to not drag straight into the project, but to process them first.
Your last point is on the mark: in general try to get things “archival ready” before putting them in Scrivener. 2.0 makes it quite easy to edit individual files in external editors. That could always be done, but now you get a nice button and can even easily select which program to use. One thing you might notice, as a Photoshop user, is that if you create a Droplet these will register themselves with the Mac as valid image handlers. I have all kinds of Droplets in my media footer bar menu. If a file is huge, just select a droplet that does save-in-place adjustment and you should be good to go.
For batch adjustments, you might be better of first backing up the project, and then renaming it temporarily to not have the ‘.scriv’ suffix, so other programs can scan the interior of the package. Now using Photoshop or GraphicConverter, batch the image resources using whatever size dump you wish directly on the project files. Once completed, add ‘.scriv’ back to the name and re-open. Should be all set. Scrivener doesn’t care about media size, so this kind of editing will not harm the project. The nice thing about this method, unlike export/import cycling, is 100% retention of meta-data and organisation.
Thanks, for the info. I’d forgotten about droplets. I’ve set up two, one for dragging off a web page and placing it in my scrivener incoming images folder, which then get dragged into the project, and one for processing in situ.
If you try to edit a image inside the project with a droplet, it gets randomly unhappy.
It would still be nice to have an in project thing, even if it was just being able to run an application on the imported file as you import it… each step removed makes me happy…
Hmm, I’ve never come across this before, so I’ll have to play with it a bit further. When you say “it” becomes unhappy, do you mean Scrivener or Photoshop? If the former, try using the refresh button beside the external edit button in the footer bar.
I hear you, the only problem is, there are many different steps that many different people want. If you add them all, the application becomes a royal mess.
