From the course: InDesign Secrets
350 Exchange or swap two images - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
350 Exchange or swap two images
- [Instructor] I have two images that I want to switch. And let's say I want the frames to stay where they are. I just want to move each image into the other's frame. So, as is often the case in InDesign, there's a slower manual way to do this and a fast way using a free script. Let me show you the slow, manual way first, because it is an important technique. To swap these two images, I'll first duplicate them by clicking on the first one with the selection tool and then shift clicking on the other one to select both of them. Then, I'll option or alt drag. That makes a duplicate of those objects. Now, I'm going to double click on one image to select the image inside the frame. And I'll cut it to the clip board by pressing command X or control X on Windows. Now, I'm going to come over here and select the alternate frame, the original one, where I want to put this image into. And I'm going to go to the edit menu and I'll choose not Paste but Paste Into. Now that image that I cut replaces the image that was in there. Now let's do it to the other image. I'll double click on this one to select it, cut it to the clipboard, come over here and I'll use Paste Into and that too replaced the original image. Now you'll notice that the images are wrong size and position, so now I'm going to delete the duplicate frames just by clicking on those and hitting the delete key on my keyboard. And I'll select these two images once again, go to the Object menu, come down to fitting, and then I'll choose frame fitting options. I'm going to turn on the autofit checkbox then I'm going to tell it to fill the frames proportionately and set the crop amount to zero. You'll see, because the preview checkbox is turned on, that the images scale to fill the frame. Now I'll click OK. Okay, so that wasn't so hard but it is kind of annoying and it takes a few steps. So, now the moment you've been waiting for, how can I swap the images quickly with a script. Well, first you need the script of course and you can find that here on InDesignSecrets.com at this URL. If you scroll down this page, you'll find the link to download the script. Now, I've already downloaded this script and put it in my downloads folder. So, to install it, I'm going to switch back to InDesign, go to the window menu and scroll down to utilities. Here in the utilities menu, I'll choose scripts. Now I currently have no scripts inside my user folder. To add that script I'm going to right click on this folder icon and choose Reveal in Finder. Or, on Windows it'll say Reveal in Explorer. This opens the scripts folder and you'll see, inside of it, the scripts panel folder. Any scripts you put into the scripts panel folder get added to the scripts panel. In this case, here's the script I downloaded. You'll notice that sometimes when you download a script from a forum or a blog post, you'll see a little .txt at the end. I need to get rid of that. I need the suffix, the three letter extension to be .jsx. So I'm going to rename this by removing those four last characters. Now, I'm ready to install that script by dragging it into my scripts panel folder. All right, let's try it out. I'll switch back to InDesign and you'll see that immediately my script appears inside my user folder. To run the script, I just make sure that two frames are selected and then double click on the script. There you go, it swapped them. Let's try it again and now it's back to the way it was. Isn't that great? So, if you find yourself needing to swap your images around a lot, you definitely need this script.
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Contents
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229 Batch converting ID files to current version with the Book panel6m 9s
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230 Getting around InDesign limitations6m 46s
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(Locked)
231 Creating better callout lines with effects and object styles5m 47s
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232 Swapping column and row information in tables6m 9s
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(Locked)
233 Making bigger text link targets4m 52s
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161 Keeping page numbers on top of master items3m 55s
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162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text3m 50s
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163 Make a pop-up footnote for your ebook3m 48s
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164 Deleting tabs at the beginning of paragraphs and applying a paragraph style3m 10s
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165 Five InDesign Presentation tips6m 28s
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111 Packaging images on the pasteboard3m 32s
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112 Automatically updating figure references for books6m 9s
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113 Adding Tool Tips to your form fields in InDesign3m 21s
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114 Setting poetry, flush left, center on longest line3m 54s
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115 Use bookmarks to navigate long documents in production4m 57s
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107 Using the same keyboard shortcut for two different commands with the Context feature5m 22s
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108 Making a text highlighter3m 33s
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109 Updating an interactive PDF without losing work done in Acrobat5m 30s
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110 Adding custom text at the beginning of each line automatically4m
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089 Three great Object Styles for any designer8m 1s
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090 Choosing alpha channel image transparency2m 25s
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091 Adding and reading metadata for InDesign files3m 25s
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092 Adding ALT tags to your images6m 59s
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093 How to Place & Link a text frame's text but not its formatting7m 4s
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094 Setting the baseline position of a caption2m 39s
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051 Five things that should be in every new file5m 19s
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052 Forcing EPUB page breaks with invisible objects6m 21s
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053 Understanding component information6m 39s
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054 Creating running heads using section markers4m 16s
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055 Making a font with InDesign using the IndyFont script5m 20s
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056 Finding where that color is used7m 17s
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047 Specifying an exact amount of space between objects5m 17s
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048 Fixing last lines that are too short8m 16s
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049 Creating web graphics from your InDesign artwork7m 20s
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050 Using “No Language” to suppress unwanted hyphenation, spell-checking, and smart quotes2m 48s
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037 Updating a linked table without losing formatting5m 18s
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038 Creating electronic sticky notes4m 49s
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039 Moving master page items to the top layer for visibility2m 48s
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040 Five guide tricks that will impress your coworkers6m 18s
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041 Letting InDesign add the diacritics4m 21s
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042 Using single-cell table cells for custom paragraph formatting6m 2s
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027 Creating running heads using variables5m 1s
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028 Live Caption tips and tricks8m 3s
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029 Making professional drop caps10m 37s
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030 Making two-state buttons in interactive documents5m 5s
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031 Moving pages from one document to another3m 15s
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032 Wrapping bulleted text around a curve5m 58s
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007 Selecting through and into objects using cmd-click and Select Above/Below5m 46s
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008 Some great tips and tricks for the Swatches panel9m 40s
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009 Saving down for backward compatibility with INX and IDML5m 54s
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010 Using the INX and IDML formats to fix problems4m 46s
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(Locked)