The project for my next book (a historical work) has now exceeded 20GB, which makes it slow.
The project consist, to a large degree, of newspaper clips. Some of these I have first opened in Preview, copied a selection, then pasted into a new text. Others I have taken a screen shot of and then pasted into Scrivener. I need these clips in (very) large numbers, and I don’t wish to store them elsewhere. The resolution does not have to be high as I’m not going to reproduce them in the final book. I only need to be able to read them. I have read previous threads in the forum (477 page document is 52MB, can I get this size down? and How I trimmed a Scrivener project from 4.75 GB to 2.48 GB without losing even a comma) but none of those pieces of advise would apply here as it would be too time consuming to re-save thousands of pictures at this point. So I’m mainly asking about how to work in the future, so as to avoid the project file size getting too big. To take screendumps and insert into Scrivener is a time effective way for me to work, and I would hope that I could continue doing that, but without the project getting all too large.
What I did, and still does every day is using a Keyboard Maestro macro, that does the schrinking job for me, thus making the overall project size managable.
Typically this will schrink a photo from 2000pixels with to 500, thus reducing size about 16 times while maintaining readability. Depending on your need for details you may even get better savings and still maintain readabilty.
The macro(s) I use are run wia dedicated shortcut keys, thus making it a speedy reliable process.
I can share the macro I use, and the userforum at KM is super supportive
If the files are photos in jpeg format, there are many (!) tools to shrink the file size. macOS Preview does the job using the Menu: File → Export command. If PDF, I routinely use the low-cost app (buy from developer better than App Store) “PDF Squeezer”.
a windows user but can you do File > Import > research files as shortcuts The file appears like a normal picture, pdf etc but is linked to file on the computer and decrease project size dramatically. The other beauty of this is you can import multiple files at once. So organize research first and import folder one at a time. You can take imported files and organize them in folders as well.
Files imported this way have minimal impact on overall project size.