I've let myself get beyond furious while working on converting a novel into an epub through InDesign. I've searched similar threads across the web, but none have been particularly helpful.
I'm using InDesign 2022 17.0 on a Macbook Pro, OS Monterey 12.4
I'm trying to insert an author photo and an image of his books at the end of the novel. No matter what settings I choose, the photos insist on coming in way too small, or horribly distorted (stretched tall and thin) on their own page. I'm testing my files through Apple Books and my own Kindle Paperwhite (10th Gen), since I realized Kindle Previewer 3 wasn't accurately depicting what I was seeing on my Kindle.
I've anchored my author photo and book photos to the first line of text that appears underneath it. So in the case of the author photo, I have "About the Author" at the top, then the photo, then the author's bio beneath, and the photo is anchored to that first line of the bio.
Choosing "Relative to Text Flow" and "Relative to Text Size" causes the massive distortion and puts the image on its own page. "Default" and "Fixed" often export the photo to be less than half an inch wide.
In the previous book in this series, I somehow managed to get the photo to behave enough to send to the client, so I thought I could just use that same file in my Book file and export that, with only minor changes to the text and swapping out the book photo for an image that showed the full trilogy. But once I exported it as a full Book, it just had the same issues as before.
Attached are a series of examples. Apologies for the redacting, since this book isn't published yet and I can't release images, but I hope you can still understand what's going on. The first example is what I get through Apple Books. I'm satisfied with the sizes of these images. I've tried so many versions (in the hundreds) that I can't tell you specifically what settings gave me this result, but...
This next example is that same file viewed from my Kindle. As you can see, the photos are ridiculously small.
Other versions with different settings look like this:
I'm about ready to pull my hair out. I can't figure out what causes these problems. "Relative to Text Flow/Size" shouldn't cause a photo to blow up full-page, and nothing should stretch a photo out of proportion. The source photos themselves are about 2-3 inches. They stay about that size when I place them in InDesign, and then on export they freak out.
There has to be something about placing images that I'm missing. Small images for section breaks in chapters give me zero issues.
