ID placing files at half their actual size

Hi @Todd_Morgan , Can you share the ID file and the placed JPG?

In general JPG is not a great format for placing—besides the sizing glitches, it has to be flattened, you’ll likely get a double compression on a PDF export.

I found one of the posts on user voice:

https://indesign.uservoice.com/forums/601180-adobe-indesign-bugs/suggestions/45153514-72-dpi-images-not-placing-at-100-scaling-to-216

This has been a historical issue and has been covered before over the years.

There's an alogorithm in InDesign that will scale certain oversize JPGs when placed, supposedly to make them easier to handle. Perhaps because most digital cameras save their images with a default 72ppi resolution in the header so would always place very huge on a page. I forget what the threshold is in pixels, but it seems to do it at certain sizes and not others. And sometimes it might even come in at something like 20%.

And I recall doing a bunch of tests to find that threshold. For instance: if you had an image with a nice even number like 1000x1000 or even 1024x1024, it would scale down, but if your image was an "off" value, like 1023x1023, it wouldn't. There was no rhyme or reason to it.

I'm sure we put in a user voice bug report on it at the time, but I can't find it now.

How are you measuring this? By pixel? By inch?