Image storage and compression in Writer (now inline only?)

Someone told me that LibreOffice Writer fairly recently changed the way images are stored in documents (all images are now inline?? I’m not sure) so now all my Writer documents with images are much larger (disk space and, more importantly, RAM/memory). Two questions:

  1. Is it possible for an individual user to go back to the old storage method (if what I was told is correct)?

  2. Are there any settings that would let me automatically compress images (either all or above a certain size) to save memory?

We changed nothing like that (inline?). If you insert an image we always have and still do save it unchanged in the document, if this is possible. If you think the image is too big, then use the “Compress Graphic” (right-click on the image in the document and you will see that option) and recompress the image to a smaller size.