Does Scrivener work well for writing a non-fiction book with lots of images?

Hi there everyone,
I’ve owned Scrivener for a long time but never really got around to learning it properly and wondering if now is the time. I am writing a book which will contain lots of images - the kind of book that iBooks author would have been brilliant for but thanks to MPU I know that it’s on it’s way out. Has anyone used Scrivener for an image heavy book? Or any other thoughts? (likely self publishing so publisher compatibility is not vital)
Thanks all
Susan

1 Like

A friend’s MacBook slowed down when she misused the Corkboard mode to create a mini-Pinterest with several hundred images all showing in one space, and she ended up migrating the pics to some Mac moodboard/pinboard app.

Not sure, but I think you might get best performance by having Scrivener point to images located on your drive rather than import them into individual pages. Good overviews here:

and

2 Likes

According to this: https://www.relay.fm/mpu/427

Images can be tough for Scivener when laying stuff out.

2 Likes

Continuing the discussion from Does Scrivener work well for writing a non-fiction book with lots of images?:

I don’t write any fiction, just technical stuff. That said I don’t think fiction or non-fiction is relevant I’m more than pleased with Scrivener. My documents are 10 to 200 pages.

For my use of Scrivener, rather than paste images into the text I use <$img …> placeholders and put the images into a Reference/Figs folder. Never ever saw any issues with performance, etc. In fact, never gave any thought to there being an issue.

The good of this is that if the same image used in multiple places, then easy to use the same image repeatedly and if update of the image is required, that’s easy too.

A down side of this is that I feel is that when writing/editing on the iPad, the images don’t show up in any compile I do from there. No big deal for me. So I just don’t compile there. I guess it’s also harder to “read” a document with only image place holders since the figures can’t be seen in context, but I rely on the compiled versions (viewed in a Preview PDF view)–again, no big deal.

I don’t know what you mean by “lots” of images (how many is “lots”?), but if I were you and concerned I would do an experiment. Simply create “lots” of images (copy/paste in finder would do this easily, import (drag and drop works well) them all into a test Scrivener project reference folder, then in one to many Scrivener document draft files, put in “lots” of image placeholders for each and every one of these figures. I’m guessing you could use a text editor and a macro to automate this if “lots” means hundreds/thousands of files. But just do it. Experiment with writing and see if any performance hits. Do some compiles and see if it works. Test and see. Taking an hour or less now to give comfort or at least find if there are issues before investing many hours seems prudent.

Just a thought

5 Likes

Thank you so much - really helpful

Thank you - great ideas