After I copy a web page and paste it into Scrivener, with photographs in it, some of them become quite large. If I right-click on them to adjust their size, from time to time, Scrivener freezes and I just hear a beep every time I try to do anything. I can move the windows, go to other apps, etc., but anything in Scrivener is frozen solid. I’m using High Sierra 10.13.6.
A mysterious system beep whenever you try to interact with a specific program is sometimes caused by a dialogue box that needs attention, but is for whatever reason not visible. You can sometimes hit the Esc key to dismiss it, and if that doesn’t work, sometimes you can find the dialogue using Mission Control (hold down the Ctrl key when tapping the Mission Control key on your keyboard, to limit it to Scrivener’s windows alone).
By the way I prefer to change the size of the image to what I want before dropping it in. Even Preview can do this with the Tools ▸ Adjust Size… menu command. If you note how wide the widest image is in Scrivener, then in the future it’s pretty easy to just type in that number for anything larger. The advantage of this approach is that you are only saving the pixels you need to display the image at the size you want. If you change the size in Scrivener to make it appear smaller, it is then using more disk space then it needs to be because that only changes the display size.
The Escape key trick never worked for me. I will try the Control key variant.
I personally use Photoshop to control the size of images but in the situation I described I copied and pasted a fairly large web document in which all photographs appeared “normal” in size, e.g., half a column wide, etc. But there are exceptions and they somehow turn into gigantic images once pasted into Scrivener. The number of points is in the millions. See encl. screenshot.
Ah, that’s a good clue. A very weird result like that is surely the cause for nonresponsive behaviour. Is there an image URL you used to achieve this result that we could test with? Feel free to send me a private message with it, if necessary.
Also let me know the following:
- Browser used to save the image.
- Method of saving the image (or method of transit if it was imported straight into Scrivener).
- If saved, what the image looks like in Preview’s info palette.
- macOS version.
- Any relevant editor settings:
[list][*] Zoom level
- Fixed-width/wrap to view/Page View
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