Hi, I’ve been using Scrivener for a few novels and love it, but I’ve encountered a few issues recently when adding images to a particular project and was wondering if anyone could help me out.
I have found that as I’m working Scrivener constantly freezes for around 10 seconds and says ‘Not Responding’, then carries on okay. It seems to happen when clicking between folder sections the most, but is not limited to this and seems to be every minute or so of activity.
At first I thought it may be autosave, but I upped the period of inactivity until save, but it didn’t fix anything.
Then I thought it might be because I had copied and pasted images into my project. I noticed that the project files greatly increased in size, even though the images weren’t very large (around 300kb each). One of the Rich Text files (with 9 images each around 300kb ) had shot up to 34mb. So I thought I would try removing all the images and linking to them instead. The project files have remained small but the freezing problem persists.
I have noticed in Windows Task Manager that the Project requires around 335MB of memory to run. When a freeze occurs the Memory usage drops to about 100MB and then slowly counts back up to 335MB (taking about 15% CPU power) during which time the program is unresponsive.
Other Projects that only have text work fine, seem to take a lot less memory, and don’t seem to exhibit this fluctuation in memory.
I tested my problem project by saving a copy and removing all the image links from it. The Memory usage is back down to around 100MB, using 0.5% of my CPU, and the freezes disappear.
So, my question is, has anybody else experienced problems when adding images to their projects?
Is it a limitation of the software in handling images, or am I perhaps adding them wrong?
I’ve tried copying a web image and pasting it into the editor as well as doing Edit --> Insert Image Linked to File… both ways have produced the freezes. All the images in the project are from my own website or HDD and are 1920x1080px jpgs, each from around 150kb to 650kb in size.
I’ve been trying to sort this out for a couple of weeks now, since the project I am working on will ultimately require hundreds of images (so far I’ve only added around 30 and it’s become unusable).
Any help or suggestions will be greatly appreciated! 
Tech specs:
i7 PC running Windows 8
32Gb Ram, solid-state sytem drive, External SATA drive for project storage
Scrivener 1.7.3.0