InDesign: large document question

I have just started production and there are about 2GB of images that must be placed and at least 100 pages for this catalog

Hi @eahuffman , linked images are displayed with low res preview proxies so even a document with 2GBs of links should not be particularly large unless something else is going on (e.g., metadata or complex vectors). Here’s a page with a 1.4GB linked image, and the ID document size is only 2MB.

Hi @eahuffman:

I don't have a specific number (in MB) to offer but personally, I would break the file into sections and then collect them into a book for pagination purposes. (It helps that I am already comfortable with InDesign's book features.)

Are there any logical breaking points? If not, I would lay out the first twenty pages and see how InDesign is behaving. If all seems good, then create the 2nd 20, and so on. And be sure to save incremental backups—it will happen for you automatically if you save directly to Dropbox or to the Creative Cloud drives. Otherwise, just regularly save a section under a name.

And you know to use File > Place to link the images (and not Copy/Paste which will embed the images)?

It sounds like the client is flexible, but if there is pushback remind them you can export a single PDF from the book file.

~Barb

1. Important is that all placed and imported assets are linked and not embedded. Avoid EPS files.
2. Split the document at chapters. It makes InDesign faster.
3. Put all INDD files together in an InDesign book file INDB.

You will get a much stabler workflow than if all is in one single INDD document. So you have less danger with corrupted ddocuments. You get also the possiblity to reorder the chapters.

The standard approach is to link the images so you're not creating an InDesign file as big as that. What you should let us know is what are the system specs the project will be created on: Please tell us what operating system (exactly) you're running. Please tell us (exactly) what InDesign version you're using. Also you computer specs (RAM,. hard drive space and kind of hard drive). Are the images stored locally or on a server?