From the course: InDesign 2023 Essential Training

Options when placing images - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2023 Essential Training

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Options when placing images

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- [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. Now, 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 dialogue box by pressing Command-D on the Mac or Control-D on Windows. And inside this dialogue box, you can select several images at the same time by selecting one. I'm just going to grab this first one called kids In shop. Now, this is the links folder that's inside the exercise files folder. Okay, so I've selected that first one, and now I'm going to hold on the Command key on the Mac or the Control key on Windows and select another one. Let's say, this pink bouquet. Now I'll grab a third one. How about this, shop flowers? And finally, I'll grab one more. All four images are selected inside this dialogue box, so I'll go ahead and click Open and InDesign loads all four of those onto my Place cursor. You can tell that there are four because there's a little tiny blue four inside parentheses next to the cursor. In fact, you can actually move through the images one at a time by pressing the left or right arrow key on your keyboard. Let's move through here until we find the one we want. And then I'm going to click inside this blank graphic frame in the background and InDesign places the image into it. Now the cursor changes, because I only have three more images to go so I can click down here, I'll click over here, and then this last one, I don't really need that, 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'm going to go back to the File menu and choose Place. Now I'm going to choose this file called HP_logos.ai. This is an Illustrator file with multiple art boards but this same technique will also work with a PDF file that has multiple pages. Now, when you have a file that has multiple pages or art boards, you can tell InDesign which page or art board you actually want to import. To do that, turn on the Show Import Options checkbox here in the dialogue box. Show Import Options tells InDesign that when you click the Open button, it should open a new dialogue box, one that gives you some options. And here we can see that there are three total pages inside this file, and I can even preview each one of them separately. Now, I can import all three of those by clicking the All button over here, or I can import a range of pages if I want. For example, let's just grab pages one to two. When I click Okay, InDesign loads up the Place cursor. In this case, I want to put the image on the previous spread, so I can navigate up there, even though that Place cursor is loaded. I'll move up here and then click on top of this blank frame here. As for this last image, I don't really need it, so again, I'll just press Escape. Okay, let's import one more picture, but this time I won't use the dialogue box. I'm going to drag it right out of a folder on my desktop. First, let's switch back to the Finder or Windows Explorer, depending on your operating system. Here, I have that same links folder open from the exercise files folder, and I'm going to grab the image that I want, this AI file over here, and drag it into InDesign. I just dragged it right on top of the InDesign window, and when I let go of the mouse button, it doesn't look like anything happened. But as soon as I switch back to InDesign, you can see that the Place cursor has been loaded. That's the image that I had selected on the desktop. So I can simply come over here, click and drag, and InDesign makes a frame and puts that image into it. Images are a critical part of most InDesign workflows. The more you can control how you import them, the more efficient you're going to be in this program.

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