How much ram does InDesign use for an illustrated book?

[Bodhitree]

An acquaintance of mine is buying a new M1 Pro MacBook Pro for general use and some graphic design. Now she hasn’t done any graphic design for over a decade but used to do illustrated books in QuarkXPress. She has never worked seriously with Adobe InDesign, so she is wondering how much ram does InDesign use for illustrated books? Say a book of 250 pages in full colour, with an illustration every few pages, some full page at 300 dpi but most smaller.

 

[Slartibart]

This is almost impossible to answer accurately. Image dimension, color depth impact on this… first thing so: why would you have to work on all 250 pages the same time?

 

[Bodhitree]

You don’t — the application arranges this for you, so that you work on a stream of 250 pages and it loads low-res proxies of the images rather than the high-res content. You’re not editing the images in a DTP app anyway, so you just need to see enough of them to ensure accurate placement. Or at least, that’s what QuarkXPress used to do.

I’m assuming InDesign is similar — or maybe not?

 

[Slartibart]

It is.

Look, you can calculate roughly the memory requirements per e.g. 8x10 inch colour image (24bit - 3 bytes of RGB color information per pixel). For this you have a memory cost of 3000 x 2400 pixels x 3 = 21.6 million bytes = 20.6 megabytes. A 6000x4000 pixels uncompressed 24bit TIFF occupies roughly 71 MB.

I think that memorywise the same rule of thumb applies to your friend intented use here now than a decade ago: more is better. 🤓

The “snappyness” when working in InDesign is impacted by other factors: Live Drawing, live PreFlight, page thumbnails, hyperlink verification, cross references to name a few. Most of these you can turn off if needed.

 

[monokakata]

I can give you a data point.

I designed a 8.5 x 11 illustration-heavy book of 140 pages, all at 300 dpi. I just brought it up in ID (latest CC), and although memory usage fluctuated as I paged through it, it was typically about 1.8 gb.

On disk the book's file is 12.4 mb.

I'm on a iMac Pro with 64 gb ram, so ID could have as much as it wanted (there was a lot of free memory).

If this is important to you, I can pass the file over to my 8 gb MacBook Pro (intel) and see what happens there. I never use ID on that machine, which in any case would be a lot slower than an M1.

 

[Bodhitree]

Thanks a lot @monokakata that’s pretty much the information I’m looking for. I just wanted to be sure I wasn’t doing my friend a massive disfavour by telling her that 16 GB would be fine for illustrating books later on if she wanted to do so.