315 Streamline placement of auto-formatted images

- [Instructor] Here's a neat trick to help you streamline the placing of lots of images into a layout and have them automatically formatted the way that you'd like as soon as you place them. That would be cool, right? Let me show you how to do that. First of all, you apply formatting to a sample image as I've done to this one here. Let me zoom in a bit. You can see that it has a text wrap applied. If I open up the text wrap panel, you see there's a text wrap applied. It also has a thin key line stroke of half a point around it and of course we have the required drop shadow.

Now, if I bring in another image, let's bring this back out and I'll go to File Place and yeah, I guess this honeybee will be fine. Let me make sure in options I'm not going to replace a selected item. Okay, good. Choose Open and then let's drag it say right here. Well, of course, it doesn't come in looking like this one. There's no stroke. There's no text wrap. It comes in by default. If we look in Object Styles, it has none is the style applied to it.

So, I know what you're saying, you're saying, "Well, let's just create a style for this image "and then we'll apply that object style to this image." And we can except that doesn't mean that as soon as we place a third image into this layout that it's automatically going to get that, right? We have to always apply the new style. So, I'm going to show you this cool trick that's been around for a number of versions that will let you do exactly what you want to do. First, we start out by creating an object style from a manually formatted object as you usually do.

So, I've selected that object. Go to Object Styles. Hold down Option or Alt. Click on New Style and give it a name and I'll just call it My Images. Oh wait, no I'm not going to give it just any name. I have to give it a special name for this trick to work. We're going to call it Place Gun Frame with a capital F. As long as you name an object style exactly this with the same upper and lowercase, then that becomes the default style for all newly-placed objects.

Isn't it cool? So, I'll click OK and let's get rid of this guy. There's our Place Gun Frame style. I'll go ahead and choose File Place again and there's the honeybee. We'll click Open and then I'll place it just by dragging it here and voila, it automatically gets Place Gun Frame styled. Now, that doesn't happen with any other object style with any other name, default image, the basic graphics frame really doesn't apply to these.

This is not a graphics frame. Graphics frames are the frames that have no content and they're just being used as graphics. So, it's weird that there is no default image frame style, but by creating a style called Place Gun Frame, you can then edit it as much as you want. If we wanted to get rid of the shadow for example then that would remove the shadow from all the placed images. They still retain their text wrap of course. Ain't it cool? Place Gun Frame, it's been around for a number of versions so even if you're not using the latest version of InDesign, give it a try.