Known Participant

Answered

InDesign freezes when placing/updating placed files. Help

44 replies
1602 views
Translate

For the past month or two, any time I try to Place a file or update a Placed file, InDesign usually freezes. The cursor turns into the spinning circle. I can close and save the files after this, but cannot close the InDesign app. I try various ways to place the files. File > Place or Ctrl D or copy and paste the placed file from another InDesign file. The files I use are typically on my Google Drive and I’ve installed the Drive app on my machine.

This is REALLY getting annoying. Adobe used to be so good with bugs. Any ideas? I’ve read a few posts that say they thought version 21.3 fixed this issue but I’ve still got it.

I’ve reset preferences, cleared old versions of InDesign, reinstalled InDesign.

InDesign 21.3
Core i9 processor
Windows 11 home
64 GB RAM
500+ GB hard drive space

Thanks in advance for any tips.

Abhishek RaoCorrect answer

Community Manager

Hi everyone,

Thanks again for all the reports and testing shared in this thread.

To help with the ongoing investigation, could anyone who previously experienced the spinning cursor/freezing while placing or updating files please confirm whether the issue still occurs in InDesign 21.5 or later?

If you can still reproduce it, please try the workaround mentioned earlier: go to InDesign Preferences via the Edit menu, disable the Generative AI options, and test the workflow again to see if that prevents the freeze.

Please share your results here. In the meantime, I’ll continue to keep this thread updated with any further information from the product team.

Thanks,
Abhishek

N

nicola16B8

Participant

Constantly freezing, I’ve reinstalled, installed an older version, and it's still freezing. Force quitting is the only way to get out, and it is freezing as files try to open. Help?

Translate

R

RachelBostwick

Participating Frequently

Same problem, ongoing, disabling AI did NOT fix the problem. The only thing that fixed it is rolling back to an old version. I need the software to work so I can keep working, guys.

Translate

leo.r

Community Expert

InDesign 2027 will be released within a couple of weeks. You can already install the public beta from the Creative Cloud app. I wonder if you can try it and see if it fixes the issue? (I do understand that installing and trying the beta is yet another hassle that, ideally, you shouldn’t go through.)

Translate

I

id820

Inspiring

Same problem, disabling AI did nothing. I am unable to drag images inside indesign or file>place.

Translate

T

tvartou

Participant

Version 2.16 here. Still a problen. And problem shutting down, when it idles. Have to use job list to shut down. And in job list I can see InDesign uses up to 1 gB of memory while not functionally.

Translate

T

tvartou

Participant

It helped me disabling Generative AI

Translate

T

The ParabolicaAuthor

Known Participant

Disabling Generative AI wasn’t the solution. I tried that very early in the process. I ended up having to uninstall all Adobe software, cleaning out the remnant files and then reinstalling everything.

Translate

Abhishek Rao

Community Manager

Hi @The Parabolica,

Thanks for the update, and glad to hear things are working for you after the clean reinstall.

The product team has been working on the logged issue and would like to confirm the behavior in InDesign 21.5 or later. Could you please confirm whether you're currently using one of these versions and whether the placing/updating freeze remains resolved?

Your confirmation would be very helpful for the investigation.

Thanks,
Abhishek

Translate

W

Whimsical_Skylinec460

Participant

I was at my wits end as well, but turning off the Generative AI options worked for me! Thank you so much!

Translate

m_designs

Participant

I've followed all the suggestions made by the virtual assistant and other AI, but my InDesign still freezes whenever I place an image. Any image, large or small, png or jpeg. I have reset all preferences and checked RAM and CPU - all good.

Translate

leo.r

Community Expert

I've followed all the suggestions made by the virtual assistant and other AI,

Just in case: did the suggestions include disabling Generative AI options in preferences? Also, what are your versions of InDesign and the operating system?

Translate

Vesna31081207

Participant

disabling the Generativ AI option worked for me, thank you...

Translate

Abhishek Rao

Community Manager

Hi everyone,

Thank you for your patience and for sharing all the detailed observations and troubleshooting steps. I’ve now logged this as a bug with the product team, and the issue is currently being investigated. I’ll continue to keep this thread posted as soon as I receive further updates from the team.

In the meantime, the current workaround is the one already mentioned earlier in the thread: please try disabling the Generative AI options in InDesign Preferences via the Edit menu and then test the workflow again to see if that helps prevent the freeze while placing or updating files.

Please let me know if disabling those options improves the behavior on your system, as that information will also help with the investigation.

Thanks again for your support and patience while we work through this.

Abhishek

Translate

Abhishek Rao

Correct answer

Community Manager

Hi everyone,

Thanks again for all the reports and testing shared in this thread.

To help with the ongoing investigation, could anyone who previously experienced the spinning cursor/freezing while placing or updating files please confirm whether the issue still occurs in InDesign 21.5 or later?

If you can still reproduce it, please try the workaround mentioned earlier: go to InDesign Preferences via the Edit menu, disable the Generative AI options, and test the workflow again to see if that prevents the freeze.

Please share your results here. In the meantime, I’ll continue to keep this thread updated with any further information from the product team.

Thanks,
Abhishek

Translate

N

NesH20

Participant

Still have the freezing issue after updating to AI2027 and disabled AI-featured

Translate

Abhishek Rao

Community Manager

Hi everyone,

I understand how disruptive this must be, especially when it starts affecting your entire workflow.

I tested this on InDesign 21.3 on both Windows 11 and macOS 26.4.1, but I wasn’t able to reproduce the freeze while placing or updating files.

To help isolate this, could you try creating a new document and placing a few files there to check if the issue still occurs. If it doesn’t, please see whether this is limited to a specific document or only happens with certain file types.

I’d like to take this further with the product team, so it would really help if you could share a short screen recording showing the full workflow where the issue occurs. If possible, please also share the affected files by packaging them via File > Package and uploading them using a cloud service like Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.

Also, please confirm that you are on InDesign 21.3 while testing this.

Let me know how it goes, and I’ll continue investigating from there.

Thanks,
Abhishek

Translate

Abhishek Rao

Community Manager

Hi everyone,

Thank you for your patience while we checked this with the product team. To continue the investigation, we’ll need a bit more diagnostic data from systems where the issue is occurring.

Could you please share the following:

A short screen recording showing the exact steps leading to the freeze (while placing or updating files)
A sample file/package (File > Package) where the issue can be reproduced
A stack dump or crash dump captured at the time of the freeze. You can follow the steps in this article: Submit a crash report for InDesign

Once we have this information from a few affected users, it will help the team better understand the root cause and move toward a fix.

Thanks again for your support. I’ll keep you posted as soon as we have more updates.

Abhishek

Translate

Show more replies

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.