From the course: InDesign 2020 Essential Training

Options when placing images - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2020 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Options when placing images

“

- [Instructor] We've already discussed how to place an image into InDesign but only just the basics. Now, I want to show you a few important features that help you place multiple images quickly and give you more control over how images get placed. If you need to place a bunch of graphics you don't want to have to place them one at a time. For example, let's open the place dialog box by pressing command+d on the Mac or control+d on Windows. From here you can import several images at the same time by first selecting one, for example this pink bouquet, then hold down the command key on the Mac or control key on Windows and then choose another image. Let's go ahead and grab another one down here. And I'll grab one more too, again while holding down command or control. Now, all four images are selected inside this dialog box so I'll click open and you'll see that all the images get loaded up into the place cursor. You can tell that there are four because there's a little blue four inside parenthesis next to the cursor. In fact, you can actually move through those one at a time by pressing the left or right arrow keys on the keyboard. Let's move through here until we find the one we want. Then, just click on an empty frame. Now the cursor changed because I only have three more images to go. I'll go ahead and click down here. Click one more here. And this image, I decided I don't want after all. So I'm going to get rid of it by pressing the escape key on my keyboard. Okay, I'm going to show you two more techniques for importing images. First, I'll go back to the file menu and choose place. Now, let's choose this image called HP_Logos.ai. This is a native Illustrator file with multiple art boards. But this same technique would also work with a PDF file that has multiple pages. When you have file that has multiple pages, or artboards, you can tell InDesign which page or artboard you actually want to import. To do that, turn on the show import options check box here in the place dialog box. Show import options tells InDesign that when you click the open button it should open a new dialog box, one that gives you more options. Here we can see that there are three total pages, or artboards, in this document. And we can move through them one at a time. But I should point out that I could actually bring all of them in if I want to by clicking the all button here. Or, even just arrange. For example, I'll grab pages one to two. Now, let's click okay and InDesign loads up both of those images into the place cursor. I'll scroll up to the previous spread and I'm going to place one of those inside this frame here. And this one, I decided I don't really want after all so I'll hit the escape key to throw it away. Okay, let's import one more picture. But this time, we're going to drag it right out of a folder on the desktop. First, I'll switch back to the finder, or Windows Explorer, depending on your operating system, by pressing command+tab on Mac or alt+tab on Windows. Here I have that same links folder open from the Exercise files. From here, I'm simply going to grab that file and drag it on top of the InDesign window. When I let go of the mouse button, you can see that it imported that image onto the place cursor. That's the image that I had selected on the desktop. Now, let's come over to the right side and drag out a rectangle. InDesign makes a frame for me, and places the image into it. Graphics are a critical part of most InDesign workflows and the more that you can control how you import them the more efficient you're going to be in this program.

Contents