I have a separate Scrivener Project for my Characters and a few other odds ‘n’ ends common among multiple projects.
The more character sheets I’ve built–I have around 160 that a couple of books in a series feed from through hyperlinks–the exponentially the larger my project became. I include my visualisation of who my character might be in a little 68 x 90 points scaled picture. I produce the pictures (generally a celebrity) through sizing and cropping it in PowerPoint according to a frame with the dimensions 4.5 cm by 6 cm. The original size of the picture counts so I generally have to scale it to 68 x 90 when pasted into Scrivener. Anyway, it works, and the effect is as follows–the picture(s) are pasted into a single table cell:
The drawback is that I ended up with a 28 MB file that was taking longer and longer to backup to Dropbox. Reading recent posts, I looked at a suggestion on using the Image Linked to File option. The user manual never presented a clear enough example to tell me I was on the right track, so I went about experimenting.
I created a folder on my computer called Series Character Images and stuck it in a Research folder, also outside of Scrivener. I’m a firm believer in small Scrivener projects with content like pictures, PDFs, and whatnot saved outside of Scrivener (and accessible through links) to keep my projects small. Then I saved one Character’s picture from Scrivener to the Series Character Images folder outside of Scrivener and deleted the picture in Scrivener. Next, I used Insert > Image Linked to File and selected the image. Once in place in Scrivener, all I had to do was scale it to my choice size 68 x 90 points.
When done, I saved and exited. Once the backup completed, I compared the current backup to the prior one and noted a reduced ZIP file size. This confirmed I was on the right track. After a few hours of following the same process with all my Character Sheets, I exited and found I’d reduced my project size from 28 MB to 879 KB and reduced the backup speed to mere seconds compared to a few laborious minutes. Furthermore, there is no visual difference in my Character Sheets in the revised project.
I further checked what would happen if my project became corrupted. Would I need to rebuild the links if a reverted to a backup? Opening a backup, I found the answer is positively no.
In a synched between computers and/or operating systems workflow, this might not be the best option, but I work on a single machine, and it meets my needs quite comfortably.