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Placing Multiple Files

Lesson 19 from: Adobe InDesign CC for Beginners

Erica Gamet

Placing Multiple Files

Lesson 19 from: Adobe InDesign CC for Beginners

Erica Gamet

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Lesson Info

19. Placing Multiple Files

Lesson Info

Placing Multiple Files

All right I'm going to create a new page here actually. Let's go back and I'm going to revert again back to what we had, just because I want it back to that pristine condition that we had it in. And I'm going to actually create a whole different document here. Let's create a new one from scratch. We'll just use the preset that we had, the my letter. I did command or control n for a new document. And I want to place multiple images that are here. So I want to place several at one time instead of trying to do them all individually. Bring it in, choose the options, place it. I want to bring in several photos at one time. And I can do that. I can do several PDFs, I can also mix and match. I could bring in two text files, a PDF and 13 photos if I want to. We're going to keep it simple though, that's the mantra for today. Let's keep it simple and only focus on the items that we need to learn without figuring out how fancy we can get. That's where the fun comes in later, is that we learn one ...

thing and how can we expand that to make our work flow move faster. So in this case I'm going to turn off, show import options. Because I'm bringing in multiple photos and I don't want to have to say okay through each one, especially knowing I really don't have much options to choose from. And I'm going to find my photos and I'm going to come in here and we'll grab all these people photos. And I'm going to select all of them. I'm going to shift and select, so I get everything selected. I've got four of them selected and I'm going to say open. And now I'm going to get this loaded place cursor that shows me the first one in the list that I have. I can use the arrow keys, which is what I was trying to do with the PDF. I forgot that you can't do that. I'm going to cycle through and find the one that I actually like before I place it. So I loaded them all up so I don't have to keep going out to the place dialog, but I don't know what order I want to place them in. Let's start with this one. And I'm going to click and drag and then I'm going to do one that I only want one person here because I'm going to click and drag and hold down the shift key. So I get kind of a tall image and I'm going to eventually crop her out. I want to crop one of the women out and just have just one of them showing. And then I'm going to do this one. We'll go ahead and get this one full, actually let's do this one, kind of narrow. Again, I'm going to have to crop that and then do the same thing down here. So I'm able to place all of them, now I just need to play with how they fit in there. But it's a great way to add multiple images at one time. I'm going to come right back to this page in a second. I'm going to create a new page and just show you a really cool trick that you can do when you're placing multiple images. Let's take a different set. We'll do the wheat, and the sunflower, and the sand dunes. No let's do this one. I wanted four of them. I say OK. And this time I've got those four images, I can see they're all here. They're all fairly wide images. But what I want to do is I want to click and drag, and before I let go of my mouse, I want to make an actual grid of these photos. Instead of trying to draw four of them out and use smart guides to line them up and make sure that they're the same width, et cetera, I can go ahead and create a grid on the fly using something called Gridify. But Gridify doesn't have a tool and it doesn't have a menu item, you just sort of have to know the secret handshake to get there. So what I'm doing is I'm clicking and dragging with that first image that's here. I'm going to use the up arrow keys and it's adding another row of images. You can kind of see that there's two images now. Still holding down the mouse key. I'm going to use the right arrow key and it adds another column so now I've got four images ready to go and I can play with the size. And I know they were kind of wide so I'm going to keep it kind of wide to set it up. I also want to play with the spacing that's in between. You can kind of see there's dash lines that show me the gap in between. I'm going to hold down the command or the control key and hit the up arrow key which gives me a little space in between. Now I'm holding down the command key and the right arrow key and making a little space in between the columns. Keep in mind, I'm still holding down the mouse key also. This is what I like to call, a bring a friend shortcut, because you need several hands to do this. Especially on a laptop sometimes. All right so I adjusted the spacing. I've got two rows, two columns. So I've got my four frames, I know I have four images in there. Holding down the mouse key and then I'm going to go ahead and release. As soon as I release it, it places each of those images in that particular frame. Oops, I did not want to undo that. I want to zoom in on that. When I do that of course I can see where the frames are and the frames are equal, but the images look weird and that's because they're all different sizes. And again, the default setting that I have set up is there to fit to the frame proportionally and not crop anything out, so we want to change that. We actually want to make sure that we go ahead and change the fitting for those. So what I'm going to do is zoom in and I'm going to do all of these at once. We can do these individually. We can even set it up as a preset so when I bring in images it automatically crops for us. But I've got each of those frames selected. I'm going to go up under the object menu, under fitting. And I'm going to choose, fill frame proportionally and what that's going to do is make sure I don't have any white space on that frame at all. It's going to fill it out and it is going to end up cropping it but I can always move it afterwards. So I'm going to say, fill frame proportionally. Now it automatically fills that frame and if I turn off my edges here, I can see that it's a nice grid that we created on the fly from those four images. And actually they all look pretty good. But I can actually make changes to that which is also what I need to do back on this page to get the guys. Oh we actually got rid of that line I think. Yep we got rid of that, that's right. We did basically the same thing here where we had a narrow image and we want it to fit. Now I can tell it, fill frame proportionally. That's a good place to start. So under fitting, fill frame proportionally. That's great but obviously we've cut off some people's heads and we need to actually fix that.

Ratings and Reviews

Susan
 

Fantastic course. I have used Illustrator and photoshop, but learned when under tight deadlines. We are going to begin using inDesign to publish a more extensive multipage newsletter, and I wanted to build a better knowledge foundation of this tool, rather than just diving in. The course was comprehensive and I feel that I'll be able to make a better product after taking the course.

Terri
 

Have loved Erica since I was a baby designer. She is a great educator, and even though I have been using ID for about 8 years, I just changed from CS6 to CC. This was a great refresher as well as a mental upgrade to new options and effects.

Gilbert Beltran
 

I enjoyed these classes. Learned the Indesign toolbox and picked up a few smart tricks. Erica is great at keeping up the pace and being very clear and easy to follow.

Student Work

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