Hi,
I’m pretty new to Scrivener and I’m writing a travel book. It’s text-heavy but requires photos to be inserted throughout the text. I do realize that Scrivener is an outlining/draft software, but was looking for advice on how to best do the photos. Would you recommend inserting them at the end–after it’s converted to Word, etc.–or would it be advisable to insert them into my Scrivener draft for some reason? Any advice would be appreciated. In the past, inserting graphics into Word is a complete mess and I’d like to avoid it, even at the last stage of the publication process.
Thanks for any tips!
bamboo693
In my opinion it is quite safe to insert the pictures into your draft as you work in Scrivener. The main thing you’ll be missing up-front is the ability to do any kind of advanced word flow around the pictures. So if you did wish to flow text to the right or left of a picture, that is something you would need to do after the final compile to Word. If centre-aligned pictures on their own line are fine, then you would probably not need to do much at all after compiling.
There is the matter of picture size. If the graphics are all print-resolution, they can be quite large. So some people prefer to keep them stored outside of the project, and merely link to them in the editor. This is quite intuitive—they will look and act as though they have been fully embedded in the text. The main difference is that they are loaded dynamically off of the disk the first time you load the section they are linked within. When you compile they will similarly be temporarily imported and embedded into the document (since most word processors do not support linking, anyway). They will remain linked in the project itself though—embedding while compiling is something that only happens for compile.
To insert a linked image, use Edit/Insert/Image Linked to File.... As you might expect, this also makes it easy to work with placeholder graphics. As the final copies are completed they can be replaced on the disk without having to delete and re-embed them as you would normally have to do.