Win 10 Papyrus Author Free 1006a Win64
How is best to replicate/format this image heavy research project for ebook, is currently 120 pages of A4, and growing (around 900 pictures) obviously what works at A4 size on a 4 inch screen wiill be next to useless
900 pictures is quite a lot. What size is each picture, both in pixels as well as in kilobytes?
If I assume each picture to be about 1 inch x 1 inch or 25.4 mm x 25.4 mm = 645,16 mm² then the total area of all 900 pictures would be 580,633 mm². That’s far below the limit of Papyrus at 9,000 mm x 9,000 mm = 81 million mm² and so you shouldn’t run into limitations from this side.
If each picture takes about 70 kB of memory (in .jpg format) then all 900 pictures combined will make 63,000 kB or 61 MB which I would assume ebook readers can still handle.
As for creating the book, the main content seems to be a catalog of coins with some information about each coin. You will have the biggest flexibility if you create a database with Papyrus Base which stores all the images and information. Then the catalog pages can be generated as a report from this database. This report is a papyrus document itself and it may only need a title page and some front matter or whatever additional information is needed.
Since you can create several report templates for the catalog pages you would be able to play with different layouts and arrangements for the book.
For example, it might be good to try a layout where the information about the coins is displayed in a small, separate table but the pictures themselves would be under the table in a normal text line. This would be easier displayed on a small ebook reader screen. Also, the notes could be displayed under the pictures or under the information table.
All these different variations can be easily tested with separate report templates as only the template needs to be adjusted and then all the catalog pages can be generated within seconds. Then export as an ebook and test it on an actual device.
is the database available in free version?
Welcome to the Community 
No, database functionality is only available in Papyrus Author Pro. There is a specific “My Research” database, which is ideal for detailed projects where you wish to catalog information and store sources, etc.
Papyrus Author does have several features you could utilize.
Tables can be inserted so you could use to replicate the images you have shown in your first post. There is more information on using tables in our Wiki article here.
There is also great flexibility with paper sizes so you could, for example, create a custom size making the page longer and/or wider than a normal A4 sheet.
Margins can also be adjusted to increase the printable area of the page.
With Master Pages you can have different formats for different pages of your book - for example, you could make some pages landscape with very small margins and other pages portrait with normal margins. The coin catalog could, therefore, use a different layout to other parts of the book.
There is more information on page layout and Master Pages in our Wiki article here.
Interesting, how does the free version handle endnotes then? They are stored in an Endnotes database.
Unfortunately, Papyrus doesn’t yet support mixed orientations (portrait and landscape) within the same document. If you could bump up this feature on the to-do-list, this would be much appreciated.
Oh, and master page layouts won’t help with ebooks in .epub or .mobi format but they are very useful for .pdf of course.
Endnotes are only available in Papyrus Author Pro.
Oh that’s right! Thanks for correcting that 
