Pages Shape and Image Placement and Wrapping

When you add a shape or image to a Pages word processing document the object will be anchored to the text, which will wrap around it. You can change the object's settings so it stays on the page or is inline with text. You can also change how text wraps around the object.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you the different shape and image placement options in Pages. 
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 1000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about it.  Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts. 
I know a lot of people get confused when it comes to placing shapes and images in Pages. When you put an object over some text the text wraps around it and the shape or image moves with the text sometimes and sometimes it doesn't. Let me show you all the different options. 
So in Pages we're going to work in a word processing document, not a page layout document. I'm going to open up the plain blank template here and then I'm going to insert some sample text. Now when placing an object it doesn't really matter whether you're using a shape or an image. So I'm going to start off by talking about shapes but all of this applies to images as well. I'm going to create a new shape here by clicking the Shape Button at the top and I'm just going to choose a simple rectangle. It's going to place a rectangle here inside the document. I can move the rectangle around and notice how the text wraps around it. 
Also, if I were to insert some extra lines here at the beginning notice how the shape moves with the text that it's inside. So this is what we call being Anchored to this text. As a matter of fact if you go and click on the shape you'll see the anchor. It's this little blue do with a line right here. This is the anchor for the shape or if we were using an image for that image. If I were to move this around notice how it will change, there's the anchor right there, there's the anchor right there. It's always the end of a line and it's always just before the beginning of this. Notice it couldn't be here because this shape is actually pushing away some of this. So it is at the end of the line just before it. I move it down here and you can see it is right there. 
Whether it works like this, with the text wrapping like this and anchored to some text, depends on your options. So these are the defaults. What are the other options? Well, if on the sidebar here we go to Format and then Arrange with the shape or image selected we'll see all the options here at the top. First we've got Stay on Page or Move With Text. The default is Move With Text and you can see that's what it is doing. It's got this anchor here and it's moving with the text. If we insert 10 paragraphs before this then it would push the shape down with this anchor so that it's 10 paragraphs lower. But if we switch to Stay on Page then it no longer has an anchor in the text. Instead it's here on Page 1 at this particular position. If we were to insert some more text the shape or image stays in the same place. 
Now whichever one of these you've chosen you also have text wrapping options. So the default is Automatic. We'll get back to Automatic in a minute. Let's go and look at some of the specific settings here, like Around. We switch to Around and we see nothing happens. That's because Automatic had actually chosen Around for this particular shape. Around simply means that the text and shape share the same space but the text will not overlap the shape. So as I move it around the text avoids the shape. If I were to switch to Above or Below then the text will only be above or below. It will never be to the left or the right side. We can still move the shape around and the text will adjust but it will never have any text to the left or right. 
Now if I switch back to Automatic you could see it is the same as Around in this case. But what if the shape was bigger? If the shape was bigger and it was set to Automatic see that eventually the shape gets big enough where Automatic really means above and below. It turns out if we move the shape all the way to the left you could see that it switches to being similar to Around. So, Automatic not only worries about the shape's size but also whether it is all the way to the right or left in determining whether it is going to wrap around or above and below. 
Now let's go to None. None is pretty easy to understand. The text doesn't wrap at all. So in this case there is still an anchor there. This shape will still move with the text but the text will never get out of the way of the shape. It will always just be there overlapping it. 
In Line With Text does something a little different. Instead of having this anchor here and having the shape being relative to the anchor, it actually puts the shape in exactly that spot. So it works just like it is a character in the text. So we switch to it. Then you get a rather odd result when you have a large shape like this. If I were to select it and drag it around notice I can see the line cursor there. It's right where the pointer is. The little yellow line there. Wherever I leave it this is exactly where the shape is. You can see it is right before this word, right after this one.
It doesn't make as much sense when you have a large item here and you have it in the text. But it makes sense in two other situations. One is when you have a small shape. Let's do a star here. Let's make the star really small. About the size of a regular character. If we change it to In Line With Text then we can see it kind of makes sense. It's right here as kind of an extra little character in the text. I can drag it around and move it somewhere else. I can put it right after this word, for instance, like that. Then we can still treat it like a shape. We can still go in and make it larger, change its color, all sorts of things. Now the other case where it kind of makes sense is if you have a shape or an image and you set it to In Line With Text and you give it its own line. So right here I'm going to place this at the end of this paragraph here. But I'm going to give it its own line right here, like that. So this is one paragraph. This is on a paragraph by itself and this is another paragraph. So I can select the paragraph here, just putting the cursor after the shape. I can set it up, for instance, to have more spacing before or after. I can set it up to be centered. Then it kind of makes sense here to have it flow with the text so it is just between these two paragraphs there's an image or a shape. 
Now this is particularly useful if you're creating an e-pub document. This is a document that you would read in an e-book reader where the user can change the font, change the size of the text, and everything. The text kind of just flows like a novel. So in that case when you try to place an image exactly it may not really look good as the user adjusts the text. But having something that is In Line With Text, just between two text paragraphs like this, means it will always appear right at that spot in the text and kind of have its own space. 
Now let's get away from using a rectangle there.  Instead let's use a shape that has some curves, like a circle. So I've got a circle shape here and notice how the text not only wraps around here, you can see it conforms to the shape. Text here makes a circle going around. If we adjust the shape we can see here, because we've got it set to automatic,  that it eventually goes to above and below. We can set it to around and make sure that it is always conforming to the shape. You can change that with this Text Fit switch here. If I switch to just rectangular then it is going to behave just like it's a rectangle. So it's going to ignore the shape inside. You can use Spacing here to increase or decrease the spacing to have it conform more tightly or less tightly to it. The same thing was true with a rectangle before. You've got extra spacing that you can give to the text to push it away so it is not right up against the edge. 
Now let's get away from shapes and actually look at using images here. Of course a photograph is going to be rectangular. It's going to behave just like a rectangular shape. But I'm going to bring in this image here which is actually a png with a semi-transparent alpha channel here. So you could see how the text wraps around according to the shape in the image. This only happens automatically if the image is a semi-transparent image like a png. Now I can use text to fit here it be squared like that. I can change the text wrap to be above and  below if I like. But if I use Around or Automatic I'm going to get it like this where it conforms to the shape. 
But what happens if the image doesn't have transparency? Here's the same image but it is just a jpeg image and there is a solid colored background here. Now typically you might be working with this and it could be a white background. So you may wonder why doesn't it wrap around it when in fact the problem is that it is a jpeg image in this case. JPEGS don't have a transparent layer like that so it's always seen as a white rectangle pixel even if some of those pixels are white. To make it easier to see what is going on I made those pixels a color instead of white. Now you can still have the text wrap around this image thanks to the Remove Background button here. If you go to Format, Image, Remove Background it will attempt to remove the background there. It identifies the background as being blue and it gives it, kind of, an alpha channel and you could do Done. You can see it gives it a little bit of a blue halo because it is not doing it perfectly. You can actually use Remove Background and then click and drag inside of the background area. Increase the amount and you can see as I do it too much it's removing the apple itself. I want to get it just right like that and Done. Now you can see it's conforming a little bit better. There is not as much of a halo. So you do have options if you have an image that is not semi-transparent.
Now another thing you can do is you can actually mask an image with a shape. You can use any shape you want. Let's do a circle here. I'm going to put the circle here and it works just like a circle before. But I can actually Drag and Drop an image into the circle. So I'll drag this apple image in here. I'll shrink it down and position it. Done. You can see the apple inside the circle. So, the text is wrapping around according to the circle. Now the interesting thing is that this is no longer a shape. If I select it notice under Format there is Image. It's actually an image now and it's got a mask. If I click Edit Mask you can see the circle shape around it. I can even change the shape if I want. This happens with any shape. So I can do Shape and then a Star, for instance. I'll drag and drop that same image in here and let's just leave it like this. Have a textured  star like that. If I were to Edit, Mask you can see that I can change things about the star just like if it was a regular shape. So it is using a shape as a mask. You can use that to create interesting looking shapes or text wrapping. You can also use this technique to frame an image inside of a shape. 
I can use any shape but I'm going to use just a regular circle here. I'm going to drag and drop this image here. If I wanted to frame this flower here inside I could do that like this and you can see that is the result I get. You can also combine them in other ways. So, for instance, I could do a shape that is a circle like this, and let's go and change the Format Style Color Fill to No Fill. So now it's an invisible circle. It's there but it is invisible. Now I can take an image, like let's take that original apple. I won't drop it into here. I'll just put it separate. I'll shrink this down and I'm going to set this to Arrange and have it not wrap at all. So you can see it just floats over everything. But I could place it right where the hole is left in the text because of the circle. So the apple isn't actually pushing the text away, the circle is. This allows me to create a perfectly circular area here even though the image itself isn't perfectly circular. There are basically two elements here. You can see one on top of the other. You could actually group these together like that and now I've got a circle that's pushing the text away and I've got an apple that's overlaying the circle. 
So you've got lots of different options if you get creative. I hope this gives you a basic understanding  for how to place shapes and images inside of a Pages document. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 12 Responses to “Pages Shape and Image Placement and Wrapping”

Heather

11 months ago

Wow-just fantastic. you gave us so much more than I expected. Going to put it to use- right now. THANK YOU!

Steve

Once again, I learn I've been using about 75% of the functionality of this feature. Thanks for kicking it up a notch!

Colin McKinney

I often need to change the text wrap to None. Is there a way of making this the default, instead of Automatic?

Gary Rosenzweig

Colin: No. But you can always copy and paste (or Option+drag) to duplicate an existing element that has text wrap set to none. You can even store samples in another document to copy and paste. See https://macmost.com/mac-pages-tricks-for-reusing-image-settings.html

Carmel

Wish I'd received this email yesterday - would have had a few more hours sleep last night. Thank you very helpful. Can these features be used within a table?

Carmel: No, in a table the image would just be "in" a cell, so there's no wrapping or anything involved.

Alan

Very helpful, been switching over from Word over the last few weeks and these tips are proving very useful.

Lucas

I learned a great many things from your excellent tutorial. One item you did not mention in the ARRANGE tab is that little spin box labeled "Alpha." Can you please explain the function of that box. Thanks!

Lucas: That will attempt to use the alpha channel (or background removal) to wrap the text around the shape of the image, if there is one.

Sheldon

Thanks bunches

Emanuele Guerrieri Ciaceri

10 months ago

Thanks Gary. It seems that the "align" button put the object to the edges of the paper when left or right are selected. Is
Is there a way to make the button align an object to the edge of the text instead of the outer edges of the paper?

Emanuele: Just drag it there and have it snap to the edge.

Pages Shape and Image Placement and Wrapping

Comments: 12 Responses to “Pages Shape and Image Placement and Wrapping”

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