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HexagonCare
HexagonCare
Participant
April 17, 2023
Question

InDesign Error Message when placing jpg. images

  • April 17, 2023
  • 3 replies
  • 4402 views

I use InDesign for a variety of publications, one being a newsletter full of photos (can be up to 500 in one document). I've had this same issue for years and have always bypassed it, but as the magazine is growing, it is becoming much more frustrating and tedious.

 

When I place a group of images, on occassion some of the images won't place, giving the error message "Error encountered while reading JPEG image. Image may be damaged or incompatible. Reseave the image with different settings and try again."

 

I know there is nothing wrong with any of the images, and even when a set of images have come from the same source and are all the same file type (jpg) it will place some and not others. The only way I can get round it is to open the image in another program, re-save the image as a PNG and then place that file into InDesign. As you can imagine, having lots of images do this is very time cosuming!

 

Does anyone have a solution? Am I missing something here? 

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    3 replies

    Willi Adelberger
    Community Expert
    Willi AdelbergerCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    April 18, 2023
    1. When you resave an image don't use PNG. PNG is for web, not for print. Best is to use PSD  or TIFF. But saving as JPG again will mostly help
    2. Take care that the images are fully downloaded before using them in InDesign. Often you see images which are only downloaded partially but are on the remote server like DropBox.
    3. Do not embed images in InDesign, keep them linked. Embedding causes many problems.
    Bill Silbert
    Community Expert
    Bill SilbertCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    April 17, 2023

    You say that you have to resave some jpegs as pngs to get them to import. What happens if you open them in Photoshop and then resave them as a jpeg through "save as"? Even though some of your affected images are from the same source that doen't mean that they were necessarily created the same way. So it is possible that there is something in the way that the unreadable jpegs have been created which is at fault here. There are some programs out there that create jpegs in a nonstandard way. 

    Also, there were some reports several versions of InDesign ago of a bug in InDesign that sometimes brought about this result. Are you up to date on your version of InDesign and operating system? If not then updating might be worth a try.

    James Gifford—NitroPress
    James Gifford—NitroPress
    Legend
    April 17, 2023

    This. I still think RAM might be at the heart of it (as, say, ID tries to create hundreds of records, then start filling them  — I have no idea how the code works at this level).

     

    But JPEGs vary considerably in a number of ways, and it may be that the ones ID finds problematic have different resolution, encoding, compression level, etc. Keep note of examples that load fine, and those that throw errors, and examine the details of the image, file and JPEG settings on each. You may find a useful pattern.

     

    Just throwing down a wild bet, I'd guess the problematic ones are either significantly larger image files, or CMYK instead of RGB.

    James Gifford—NitroPress
    James Gifford—NitroPress
    Legend
    April 17, 2023

    This sounds very much like a process that is going to max out the system's RAM, and cause fairly random, unpredictable errors when more data needs to be read in and managed.

     

    What platform and OS are you using, and how much RAM does the system have? If it's less than 32GB, I'd bet more chips on this being the root cause. An upgrade to 64GB, far larger than most users ever need, might be in order for projects involving hundreds of image files.

     

    HexagonCare
    HexagonCareAuthor
    Participant
    April 17, 2023

    Hi James,

     

    Thanks for the reply.

     

    I'm using Windows 11, the computer has 16GB of RAM. I did wonder if this was the case initially, but it does this even when I've only just started to create the document. So currently, I have 6 images in the publication and it is still coming up with the error message when placing some of the image files. I've also tried placing the images individually rather than placing many at the same time, but it doesn't make a difference. It will accept some JPG files but not others. Never seem to have a problem with PNG files.

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