Because the app never “knows” when it’s going to be saving a document, it’s constantly updating this preview image while you work on it.

When saving documents, InDesign includes a preview image by default. To disable these, just deselect Show Thumbnails on Pages and/or Master in the Panel Options menu.

The more pages you have, the more thumbnails you’ll be generating in the Pages panel. Thumbnails and other previews become a source of slow Adobe InDesign performance as well, so it’s worth taking a look at these, too. Likewise, minimizing Live Preflight and disabling (or delaying) Live Screen Drawing can help to speed things up because InDesign wouldn’t need to create previews of every change you’re making in real time. For example, seeing everything at the highest resolution possible might be nice on a retina screen but also taxing for older machines, as they have to redraw images with every view.Ĭhanging your display performance from High Quality to Typical, which always used to be the default until just a couple of years ago, can make a big difference. If you’re looking to accelerate InDesign, carefully inspecting how you actually use the app is a sensible first step. Plus, there’s nothing too demanding involved in this optimization: all the tips presented below are simple enough so that you can give most of them a try whether or not you consider yourself a techie. But to help you do it all by yourself, we’ve gathered our best ideas and solutions below.įeatures described in this article refer to the MacPaw site version of CleanMyMac X.Īs soon as you’re using InDesign to create anything larger than a small flyer, like a brochure or full magazine, there’s a very real risk that the application will more or less grind to a halt unless you have a decent setup with plenty of memory and disk space available.īut when you’re using Adobe InDesign, slow performance isn’t just something you have to live with - there are all kinds of tweaks you can make to the app (and how you use it), as well as your hardware and operating system, to speed up InDesign. So here’s a tip for you: Download CleanMyMac to quickly solve some of the issues mentioned in this article.

Indesign on m1