Show, hide, and zoom to an image - AutoCAD Tutorial

- It's nice when you only have one image in a drawing. Unless it's huge, you generally don't have too many issues with file size and latency. When you have several or one huge image, you can toggle the images to see just the frame surrounding them while turning off all the raster data that is slowing you down. This is especially important if you have a massive aerial photo of a site and have a topography underneath it. It's nice to be able to turn on the image only when we need it not to have it on the entire time. To take it a step further, we can also toggle the frames around the image so in this video we're going to look at the image frame toggles then we'll turn on and off the images themselves. Also, we're going to look at the image frame variable within the base AutoCAD. So let's get started by jumping into AutoCAD and let's click Start Drawing under Get Started. I want to insert a couple images this time so on the Insert & Write panel click the Insert button. I'm going to grab Architectural First Floor and I'm going to use my Insertion Wizard. Notice that we can Show Frames Only right here, but I want to keep this unchecked so we can toggle that when we get into the drawing. Let's click Open, and let's step through the defaults and Finish. Now it's in. Let's zoom out a little bit. Let's grab that insert button again. I'm going to grab First Floor Area B. This time I'm going with the Insertion dialog. Let's click Open. Now notice that we have Source and Modify and Insertion. On the Source and Modify tabs, we'll keep the defaults. On Insertion, I want to go to Pick for the insertion point and we're going to pick a point like right about here. AutoCAD wants to know the rotation so we're going to hit enter to accept the default and hit enter again to accept the next default. Then we're just going to hit OK. Now it's going to zoom back in on this image. Remember that zoom also 'cause AutoCAD will take preference on which image it zooms in on automatically. For example, if we zoom way in and on our Manage & View tab go ahead and click on the Zoom to Extents, it's going to zoom back to this image which will take preference of it. If you double-click your wheel button, that will zoom the extents of the entire drawing. Now, let's toggle these frames. On the Manage & View panel, go ahead and click on the Toggle Frames button. Turns them off. Click Toggle Frames again, turns them on. Now there's an internal AutoCAD variable called Image Frame that I'd like to look at now. Type in the word I-M-A-G-E-F-R-A-M-E and hit enter. The way this works is it goes zero, one and two. Go ahead and type in a zero. You guessed it. It turns it off. On your keyboard hit the up arrow. It puts image frame back in the command prompt, and hit enter. Let's type in a one and hit enter. This will turn the image frame on and it will also plot. Hit the up arrow again, hit enter, type in two, hit enter. It keeps the image frames on, but now when you plot it it won't show the image frames. I personally like this variable the best. Now what I want to do is turn on and off the actual raster data. We do that by simply clicking on this little button right here, Hide Image. But just because we click that, AutoCAD doesn't really know we want to hide them all. That's okay. I can select this image. Now I can right-click on it, go down to Image and go to Hide. Notice it keeps the frames, but keeps the image hidden. If we click on the green Show Image button, it only turns that one on. But of course, we can select this one, right-click, go to Image, go to Show. So remember you have this choice if your drawing gets really slow. Instead of removing the image completely or unloading it, you can keep you image right in place and just turn off the raster data.