From the course: InDesign 2025 Essential Training

Options when placing images - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2025 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. 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 going to the file menu and choosing place. Here inside the place dialogue box, you can actually select multiple images. I'll press the K key to jump all the way down to this KidInShop image. Now I'm going to scroll down just a little bit and I'm going to add this additional image by holding down the Command key on the Mac or Control key on Windows, and then clicking. Let's go ahead and get a couple more. I'll scroll down, Command or Control + Click and then I'll add one more here. 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 onto the place cursor. You can tell that there are four because there's a little blue four inside parentheses right next to the cursor. In fact, you can actually move through the images one at a time by pressing the left or right arrow keys on your keyboard. Let's move through here until we find just the image we want, and then I can click. I clicked on top of an empty frame and InDesign placed that image into it. Now the cursor changed because I only have three more images to go. So I can choose an image, click, and then click. And this last one, I decided I don't want it after all, so I can 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 open the place dialogue box again, and this time by pressing Command + D or Control + D on Windows. Now I'm going to choose this file called HP_Logos. I'll just scroll down here until I find it, and then click on it. This is an Illustrator file with multiple art boards, but this same technique would also work with a PDF file that has multiple pages. Whenever 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 down here at the bottom. 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 document, and you can move through them one at a time to preview if you want. Now, I could bring all those pages in if I want to or just select a range of them, but in this case, I just want one, this one on the first art board. So I click okay and InDesign loads it up into the place cursor. This one should go on the first spread of the document, so I'll simply scroll up and then click on top of this empty frame. Okay, let's import one more picture, but this time, we'll drag it right out of a folder on the desktop. First, switch back to the finder or Windows Explorer, depending on your operating system, by pressing Command + Tab on the Mac or Alt + Tab on Windows. Here, I have that same links folder open from the exercise files, and I'm going to grab that image that I want and drag it in. I'm simply going to drag it right on top of the InDesign window. At first 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 selected on the desktop. Now I can simply drag out a frame and InDesign places the image into it. Images are a critical part of most InDesign workflows, and the more you can control how you import them, the more efficient you're going to be in this program.

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