InDesign performance issues over network (PDF export)

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
May 4, 2022
4 replies
198 views

Hi

I'm having some issues with InDesign performance over ethernet.

We have some graphic designers making large product-catalogues in InDesign.
Atm they have all their images (usually 50MB-80MB JPEGs), stored on a windows server.
When they design the catalogues, they import all the pictures into InDesign, through a network drive (SMB).

They don't have any issues designing the catalogues, however when they wanna export the catalog as a PDF, everything slows down to a crawl.Exporting a catalogue usually takes around 50-60min. Doing the same catalogue from local storage on the PC, takes around 5min.At the same time, the PC is very slow while doing the export, meaning the employees cant do anything other than sit around and wait for the export to finish.

I know working locally will be alot faster, however 10 times as fast, seems like alot.

Is their anyway to improve performance when doing these export over the network?Or are there any other solutions (eg. an InDesign counterpart to Adobe mediaencoder)?

This topic has been closed for replies.

rob day

Community Expert

Also, are the large JPEGs 8-bit? 16-bit JPEGs would get downsampled to 8-bit on a PDF export.

rob day

Community Expert

Atm they have all their images (usually 50MB-80MB JPEGs), stored on a windows server.

I’m also wondering about the 50-80MB JPEGS—what’s the typical Effective (not Actual) Resolution of the placed images? If you are using a print PDF preset, where everything over 450ppi gets downsampled to 300ppi, there could be a lot of unnecessary image manipulation on the export.

BobLevine

Community Expert

You have given us no info on the version of InDesign, Operating System, or the system specs on those machines. But this sounds more like a network issue, than an InDesign issue.

Eric Dumas

Community Expert

Hi,

That is interesting. I work with all my files online, which is slower than a wired network and do not experience this issue.

Your image files seem very large to be included in a catalogue, the size you mention would be a better fit for large prints. Have you tried to test the process with smaller images?

I used Acrobat distiller in the past, but it is quite old and probably would not suit your need.

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