Given that we have a built-in template for writing graphic novels—and by no means can Scrivener itself actually put together what someone will hold in their hands and refer to as a graphic novel—I’d say it largely depends on how you intend to use Scrivener.
As several have noted above, if you’re thinking it is going to replace InDesign, it’s not.
But do you want to use Scrivener to gather images into a freeform corkbord like a “light box”, with the ability to jot down notes on cards around the images, write bits of prose as you’re inspired to do so, with the eventual goal of getting a photo order with paired poetry/text into something you can compile to a rough copy that you can take to Affinity and beyond? Then yeah, Scrivener might be a good tool for putting together a picture book!
Really when you get down to it, it’s no different than how it is a good tool for writing a biography. One isn’t making a book with Scrivener, they are writing the text for what will eventually be put into a book—and in most cases that should be done in other software.
Some tips:
- Go into the Behaviors: Dragging & Dropping settings tab, and make sure Link to images dragged from binder into editor is enabled. This will ensure the images are not fully embedded into the text, which bloats their size and can reduce stability and responsiveness when you’re working with a lot of them.
- Enable
View/Text Editing/Show Page View, and then toggle the option below it, “Two Pages Across”. - In
File ▸ Page Setup...you’ll probably want to select a square-ish shape that is closer to how a coffee table book would use.
All right, now once you select a photo from the many you’re looking at, you can drag it in from the corkboard into the left page, insert a page break below it, and then do some writing on the right page. This isn’t page layout, but it’s close enough to give you an idea of whether or not your text will fit, and as well provides a visualisation that is close enough to the result that you can get a feel for what the reader will be experiencing. That’s one way of doing it of course, if the images are smaller and meant to mingle with text on the same page, you could sort of do that as well.
It’s going to get more difficult the more designed the page is meant to be of course, and how dependent upon that design the text quantity is. For some projects, writing into a DTP is the best solution.