Lars Eighner's Homepage Writers' Workshop FAQ: Q. I'm writing a book with many color illustrations and photographs, but the pictures make even two- or three-page sections enormous files that take a very long time to load, save, and back up. It takes a long time even to move the cursor around on a page. How should I handle photographs?

Q. I'm writing a book with many color illustrations and photographs, but the pictures make even two- or three-page sections enormous files that take a very long time to load, save, and back up. It takes a long time even to move the cursor around on a page. How should I handle photographs?

A. Your photos do not belong in your manuscript.

Even if you are self-publishing (which is going to be a very expensive proposition with 4-color photographs) there is no point in putting your photos in your documents. The quality will be so bad that you might as well have no photos at all. You need to leave the space for the photographs in your layout and provide the properly labeled photographic prints (or slides) to the printer.

If you are not planning to self-publish, your photos do not belong in the text at all.

The behaviors you describe: slow loading and saving, slow cursor; can occur even in documents that contain only text when the documents get too large. Most advanced word processors provide a way of working with smaller files for most ordinary writing and editing tasks while also allowing the files to be loaded as one big document for tasks (such a pagination and final printing) that require it. See if your word processor has such a function.