Libreoffice slows to a crawl

In working on a writer document that contains a large number of photographs, the operations slow to a glacial pace. Moving the photographs, or typing in new text take many seconds to execute–5 to 10 seconds or even 30, to move the cursor with a tab key, for example. Each keystroke produces the spinning beachball (I’m working on an iMac 21.5 desktop machine) which spins for 5-30 seconds.