Cropping unwanted image parts in indesign cs6

[Stephen Del]

I would like to permantly crop unwanted parts of imported images. Whats the best way? The unwanted parts are creating larger files to deal with.

I'm importing 36" x 48" map sections and only using small parts of them then exporting to anohter PDF. These files are 14-15 mg and when I place them back into a book 30 pages this size are slowing down my computer and creating slow printing files.

I would like to crop out a 11x17 piece of a 36"x48" images.

Thanks

Stephen Deleski

[Steve Werner]

Sorry, but InDesign has no way to crop pixels out of images. You'll have to use an image editing application like Photoshop to do that. InDesign is NOT an image editor, it's a page layout application.

[David W. Goodrich]

IDCS 6 offers the option to Crop Image to Frames when exporting to PDF, which apparently is where the OP wants to end up. To address the computer's slowing down when displaying large images, IDCS6 allows Object-Level Display Settings (View/Display Performance), allowing each image to be set independently to Fast, Typical or High Quality Display. Fast shows a grey box, while Typical shows the equivalent of an FPO (low-resolution "For Position Only"). Using High Quality only when it is needed for a particular image should speed up ID significantly.

[rob day]

I'm importing 36" x 48" map sections and only using small parts of them then exporting to anohter PDF

Unless you are embedding or the pasting images, InDesign displays a relatively low res compressed proxy of the linked image on the page, so even if you went to the trouble of cropping the image in Photoshop cropping wouldn’t affect performance in any meaningful way. When you Export, the full resolution of the link’s cropped area exports, and depending on the settings you use in the Export Compression tab it might be downsampled and compressed.

[Scott Falkner]

InDesign's "low res proxy" is simply the image, at 100%, resampled to 72 ppi. If the image is already 72 ppi or has no resolution metadata the proxy is the full resolution of the image. 

[rob day]

This shows the utility of the link proxy. The placed link is 114MB, but the Indesign file’s disk size is only 5MB. An export to PDF/X-4 outputs a 3MB file using the default compression settings—the placed image is cropped and compressed on export