299 Shrink your InDesign files

- [Instructor] Are your InDesign files suffering from layout bloat? Do they take forever to print? Do they take forever to send to a freelancer by FTP or Dropbox? There are a number of ways that you can use to slim down InDesign files. Now, I have to tell you at the outset, we're not talking about making the PDF files smaller, the ones that you create from InDesign, just the InDesign files themselves. And I think I might be doing another tip in this series about shrinking your PDF files.

But first of all, we need to figure out how big this InDesign file is, so we know where we're starting from. And of course, we can just jump to where it in the Finder or Explorer. And I have it selected here, and you can see it's 179.2 megabytes, which is fairly large, I would say, for an InDesign file that's only 16 pages long and just pictures and text on the different pages. Now, did you know that there is a way to tell how large your file size is in InDesign itself? It's a little tip in a tip! Go to the Window menu, choose Info.

With nothing selected in the document, like if I click in text, we get text stuff, in picture, we get picture stuff, I'll click in the empty pasteboard area, and you'll see that the file size. So it's 175 megabytes, or 175,000 kilobytes. It also tells you the path where the file is. Kind of neat, I like that. I think I have another tip here, called Secrets of the Info Panel, that tell you that kind of thing. All right, so first thing you want to check, if you're trying to slim down this file size, is the Links panel.

And what we're looking for, oh, we have a missing link it looks like, that's too bad, are these little icons, which means that these images are embedded. They are part of the file itself. These images down here are not embedded. And to embed an image, you select it, and then go to the Links panel menu and choose Embed Link. And what that does is it puts a copy of the original image, that you normally have linked to because you placed it, it puts a copy of the entire image inside the InDesign file in a special little pocket it has, some place where it keeps the images intact.

You can always extract the images back out. It's called unembedding the links. And even if they were a 100 megabyte layered Photoshop file, they would still come out to be the layered Photoshop file. So I kind of am a fan of embedding links because that way, I put 'em in my pocket, and I don't have to drag the wagon behind me. Every time that I move the InDesign file around, I don't have to remember to bring the folder of links around. But if the point is that you're trying to reduce the file size, obviously embedded links are going to add to the file size.

So check here first, maybe somebody else did, and you didn't even know that was happening. I'm going to Shift + click all of the embedded links, 'kay, and then go to the Links panel menu and choose Unembed Link. And it offers to relink to the original files, but I have no clue where those might be, so I'm going to say No, don't link to the original files. It'll say, okay, then where do you want me to put these files? And I'll say create a, well, I'll just put 'em in this folder called Cooking Links. I'll choose that one. And a couple files already exist in there.

Go ahead and overwrite them, I don't care. La-de-da-de-da-de-da-de-da, la-de-da, all right. So it was 177, right, megabytes? I'm going to Save, and let's check the file size right here. Still 175, how can that be? Come out here, what is the file size? 179! Oh my goodness, it got even bigger. And that's because the file sometimes carries a memory of what it used to have. What you want to do is step number two, Save As.

Now, even if you didn't unembed links, that's the second step that you do, or the first step, if you didn't have embedded links, is choose Save As. Save As overwrites all of its memory of what had happened before in this file. If you had saved thumbnails of things and so on, they are all tossed out when you do a Save As. It is essentially creating a new document. And what you usually want to do is replace the existing document. So you leave it at the same name, and you save it in the same location.

And you click Save, and yes, Replace. Ah-ha, did you see that? It went down to 102 here. According to the Finder, it is 10.5. Oh, (laughs) yeah, it went down to just another placeholder, so it's 10. That's smaller, oh yeah, that's great. So that saved a ton of space. Another thing you might want to try and check is go to Preferences under File Handling, and see what's happening with how many previews it's been saving. Now, this is the default, that it saves a thumbnail picture at 256 by 256 pixels of the first two pages in this document.

Now, where do you see those preview images? You don't see them in the Finder or Windows Explorer. If I open up Quick Look, it just says (laughs) this is what you got buddy. Now, instead you see them in Adobe Bridge, which I won't bother opening right now. But if you are a big Bridge user, then that could be very handy. And in fact, you might want to think about the trade-off. Because what you could do is say that every single page should have a preview, so I can flip through these pages in Bridge without having to open up the file. But if you're not a Bridge user, then why not just say just the first page, only that one, and make it a small one.

So click OK here, and then what I've found is that I often need to make an edit in the document and then Save. And let's see if that did anything. And it's 10,612. We only had those two pages, right, as thumbnails. So it's not going to save a whole heck of a lot, but that is definitely something you want to check. Another item is zoom way out, I'm pressing Command minus to zoom out, and look for any bad boys sitting on the pasteboard that you don't need. My files often have a ton of stuff on the pasteboard, and that will increase the file size of the InDesign document.

Make sure you're not grabbing things that are called on by animations or things that are touching the page because the user wants 'em there. These guys I know, for sure, are not necessary, so I'm going to select them and delete them. And the last thing that you want to do to save file size, and I'm not sure if it's happening with this document, but look through your Links panel and look down here under Actual and Effective resolution. That's pixels per inch. Because if you have file sizes that are way too big and you have scaled them down here in InDesign, that's causing a lot of overhead.

The best practice, if that's a concern of yours, is to open them up in Photoshop and resize them appropriately. Then replace them here instead of doing a whole lot of scaling in InDesign. I know some studios where the designers, as a matter of course, never scale more than 10% either way in InDesign. They would always scale and resample in Photoshop instead. I do want to turn you on to this wonderful plug-in though, if that's an issue for you. It is not free. It's commercial, so I can't really demo it here, but it's called LinkOptimizer from zevrix.com.

And this little plug-in will go through your entire document and optimize every image so that it fits perfectly in its frame, at the resolution that you want, in seconds. It saves a ton of time. And the latest version even does upsampling, which I thought was interesting. If you have the opposite problem or your images are too low-res, this program can batch upsample everything, apply the sharpening that you want, everything. It's really cool, LinkOptimizer from Zevrix. They've been around for a while, and they're still the best in class.

So as you can see, it's actually pretty simple to reduce the file size of your InDesign documents. Your main tools are unembedding any images , getting rid of pasteboard images, and optimizing the images that you do have, and finally, our friend, Save As.