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January 26, 2026
Question

Indesign needlessly reloading image files' viewing quality

  • January 26, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 23 views

Hello! 

 

In the last few weeks Indesign started constantly reloading images' viewing quality. I have 'High Quality Display' set by default because I need it to see details while working. When I scroll to a new image, it takes a few seconds to load from the typical to high quality, which is fine. But as I shuffle text boxes over it, parts of the image revert back to typical and have to reload to high quality again. I move a text box, it reloads. I change paragraph style, it reloads. I change the text box size, it reloads. Sometimes it happens in a part around the text box, sometimes it happens to the whole image. This didn't happen before, once the image loaded to high quality, it stayed that way while I worked. This is terribly aggravating and slows down my work process, as it sometimes takes a non-negligible amount of time to reload. You can see below how the image got pixelated after I only moved the text box.

adobe_1.jpg

I have tried tinkering with settings in 'Preferences > Display performace' and nothing helped. I have 'GPU performance' off (it can't even be turned on as I only have a 1920x1080 monitor). I tried turning off preflight. I cut down the number of installed fonts significantly (currently 83 in CC and 258 in local font folder) which helped make the reloading quicker but didn't solve it. I have ~200GB+ free space on all harddisks, including the one Indesign is installed on and the one my working files are on. I installed new graphics card drivers. I tried running Indesign with nothing else in the background. The problem seems to be less annoying after I changed 'Live screen drawing' to 'immediate' as everything works faster. I tried using an older version of Indesign, but the problem persisted... (Indesign is installed on an HDD, though I do have an SSD. I'm not sure if moving the program to SSD would enhance performance enough to solve this, since I've had Indesign on HDD for years without this problem, or if there is some part of settings I'm missing.)

 

After trying everything above, some of it helped for the problem to get less frequent and the image reloads faster, but it still happens often and sometimes takes a while to reload. I'm not sure if this is a specific performance issue or some weird Indesign issue and what could help. I didn't notice any drop in performance in other activities on the computer. I am running Indesign's newest version, 21.1.  My computer specs are:

Windows 11 Pro 64bit

AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER

16GB RAM

 

Thank you. 

 

1 reply

BobLevine
Community Expert
Community Expert
January 26, 2026

That's seven year old processor that was midrange at best when it was released and so was the video card. Additionally, 16 GB of RAM is the very bare minimum.

 

That said, there is new InDesign update rolling out now. Version 21.2 does fix some issue (InDesign release notes) and maybe it will fix this but you might want to start thinking about some upgrades.