I’d say in most cases it is the right toolchest for the job, but mainly if you’re using the right tools within it. Embedded graphics are better employed as a stop-gap to more fleshed out workflows later on, or for their convenience when they are very small and limited in use. The Insert ▸ Image Linked to File|Document… command set is what you want for larger scale uses. Linking to images is how you will find most professional tools handle this basic problem of mixing high-impact files with low-impact container material like text.
This can be made fairly low impact with the following adjustment to how you work:
- In the Behaviors: Dragging & Dropping preference pane, set Link to images dragged from binder into editor.
- Now, instead of dragging whole images directly into the text editor, drag them to the binder itself, and then into the editor.
It’s only one extra step, and it means keeping your heavy weight material separate from your rapidly evolving text content. Everything in Scrivener should speed up and stop using as much space, from typing speed to stored snapshots.
Some like to use the image placeholders metho instead. It’s a better option for those that prefer to not have the images in the writing environment at all, though.
Image handling is a bit tricky cross-platform, and in fact you’ll get best results by not having iOS touch embedded images at all, in most cases (I’d honestly say the same goes for all text editors, the less contact a text editor has with graphics the better, that’s one big reason for why we use links in pro tools). Using linked images is a way of avoiding that problem. Of course the image won’t exist on the iPhone anyway, so you’ll see a “missing image” thumbnail instead.