InDesign Error Message when placing jpg. images

[HexagonCare]

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? 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

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]

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.

[Bill Silbert]

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]

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.

[HexagonCare]

Hi Bill,

Thanks for the reply. If I resave them as JPEG through 'save as' they do work. InDesign seems to accept some of the JPEGs but not others. As an example - a colleage sent me some photos via WhatsApp. These were all taken on her phone on the same day; so same device, same file type etc. I've then downloaded/saved these photos from WhatsApp (all have saved as jpg). However, only 4 of the 11 photos will place in InDesign. This is just an example - I don't think it's an issue with downloading from WhatsApp as it's also happened when I've been sent images via email.

Both my InDesign and OS are up to date.

[Geоrge]

I would prefer to re-save all jpeg to psd. Jpeg have "bad habits" to re-use compression every time after works with it. 

[Bill Silbert]

Apparently importing images directly from WhatsApp into InDesign has been an issue for some time. In the article found here https://superuser.com/questions/1516608/why-photoshop-cant-open-whatsapp-images it says that the images created with WhatsApp are not fully compliant jpegs. The article talks about issues importing them into Photoshop. I personally had run into problems with some jpegs not opening with Photoshop and had to open them with the Mac Preview program and then make a screenshot that Photoshop would open. Thankfully, the most recent version of Photoshop seems to have solved this issue. Hopefully, the most recent version of InDesign will also solve the problem.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

This, in a larger frame. Most of the SM/chat apps modify files that pass through them, especially image files. WhatsApp, Teams, Zoom, Slack etc. are NOT good ways to transfer files that need to be used in publication.

[HexagonCare]

As I mentioned in my previous comment, it doesn't exclusively happen with image files saved from WhatsApp. This also happens with files sent via email. I've had this problem for years even before I started using WhatsApp. That's why it's so confusing.

[Willi Adelberger]

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.