Alternative Ways To Place Images In Pages Documents

While you can't change the default settings for new images in Pages, you can use techniques like custom Styles, duplicate, Media Placeholders and a template document to make it easier to place multiple images with the same settings.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's look at some techniques for placing multiple images in a Pages document with the same settings.
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Now a common set of questions I get is when you're using Pages and you place a image in the document, then you want to place a second image in the document and you want it to be formatted the same way it's difficult to do. There are default settings for an image that you can't change. So every time you place a new image you have to change some of the things about it to make it like the other images. Let me show you an example. 
So here I've got an image and I've carefully placed it here, and I've set its style to have a border and a shadow. It's, of course, a certain size. You can see it right here. An exact width and I've got it just like I want. I've even set a custom text wrapping. Now if I want to put another image in here, say just dragging a file like this, I drag it in and it's going to have all the default settings which are very different than this. I can use Styles to copy some of this from here to here very easily. I can go to this image. I go to Style and then you see these styles up here. Then I go to the next page which is blank. Click the Plus button there and you add this style. This will take things like the border and the shadow and if I select this image here and then apply it by clicking on it you can see I get the same border and shadow. But if I look under Arrange I'll see that the spacing and the text wrap are not the same. I've got this set to Around and 10 point and now you could see the default automatic control point is used for this image. Plus of course the size is different. So I have to go and reposition this, resize it. It will snap which makes it pretty easy and change this, change this, and now finally I've got two images that match. 
Maybe if you want to have a document with hundreds of different images in it and every time you add a new one you've got to apply all these changes manually. An easier way to do it that a lot of people miss is just Copy and Paste the image and change the image inside. So if I selected this one right here. I can do Edit, Copy or Command C. Then I can do Edit, Paste and now I've got a duplicate of this. I put it where I want and now I can go to Image for the selected image here and click Replace. Now I can select the file to replace. I can drag and drop something from the Finder or from the Photos App right into here. You could also go here to Media and click there and then find the photo in your Photos App like that. Let's just take this file like this and I'll click Open and then it appears in here. Now you can see this second image here inherits all of the settings including the arrangement settings. Size, and the wrapping, and the spacing, and all of that from this original one. So every time I want to add a new image I can Copy and Paste OR a shortcut for that is to hold the Option key down and Drag. That, in almost any app, means Duplicate and then you're also dragging at the same time so you can move this to a new location like that. 
Now a slight variation on this is to take this image here and go to Format and then Advance and Define As Media Placeholder. Now this doesn't change anything about the image. You could still use it just like this. Now you've got this little button here. You can click it and go and find another photo to use or you can drag and drop something into this, like that, and it instantly replaces it. So if you have this defined as a Media Placeholder I can Copy and Paste it and the pasted version is also a Media Placeholder. I can also Option Drag. Now once I've done that I don't even have to mess with this over here. I can just drag right into there for a quick replacement. Note though that once you do a replacement this is no longer a Media Placeholder. Although the original is.
Which brings up another interesting idea that solves the problem of what to do when you start a new document. You start a new document if you want to use this same type of image with the same settings as another document. You can go to that previous document, Copy and Paste in  to the new document. But there's also nothing wrong with creating a document that just holds some templates for you. 
So I can create a new document here. I'll just call this Blank. I'll even get rid of the Body Text here so that's not in the way. Then what I can do here is take my perfect image, right there, Copy it, switch over to this document and Paste it in. Now I can put it right here. If it's not already a Media Placeholder I can certainly go and set it to one right there. Now whenever I need this I can open this special document. I can call it Image Templates like that. Maybe it can hold a bunch of different images with different styles and different settings. Find the one I want. Copy from here and Paste into here to have another image that I can easily add in and then just replace the image contained inside it. You can even make this document nice and pretty by adding bits of text that describe everything like that so you could remember what the different images are used for. Make this an even more useful document that not only contains images but could contain other things like different shapes and boxes and groups of elements that you could easily Copy and Paste. 
Now another technique you may want to use is to use a shape rather than an image because you can take a shape and use that with an image inside it and it's virtually identical to the actual image itself. So let's Drag and Drop an image into the shape. You can see it's immediately going to go to the scaling and positioning here. Now I could go back to before I drop this image in here and actually set the shape up like I want it to be. So I could create a Fill that instead of being black here is maybe some neutral color. I can set the border to something that I want, like this. I can turn the shadow on like that. I could set the arrangement to be what I want as well. Then I could put this into a template document or just Option Drag, Copy and Paste, and reuse it here knowing that I could easily drag and drop an image into anyone of these anytime I want later on. In space it's easy to use shapes that are not rectangular like maybe a rounded rectangle like that to contain an image.
Now what about inline images. I like to use inline images and put them in the text in a paragraph of their own so they move easily with the text and could be used in things like epub documents without much trouble. So I'll take an image like this one. I'll shrink it down and I want to make it Inline. What I like to do is put this in-between paragraphs. So I'll go to this paragraph here, Add a blank paragraph, drag this right into that blank paragraph there. Then with this selected I can even do things like centering it, adding a little bit of space before the paragraph, a little bit of space after the paragraph, and create a nice break here that shows an image. The problem with this is you have to do that every time you insert a new image. OR you can use the technique I just showed you. Selecting this, including the previous paragraph mark right there. Copy that. Now go here and Paste it in. You can see it pasted the image in. It knew to center it. It knew to use the before and after paragraph spacing there. You have just got to be really careful to make sure you include the paragraph break before hand. If you just include what's inside here then it won't remember all of that as you can see right there. Now that I put this in here I can go to Image Replace and easily replace it. Or if I make this a Placeholder like that. I can drag and drop into it. If it's a Placeholder I can select all this with that leading paragraph right there. Go here. Paste it in. You could see this is still a Placeholder so I can easily click on it and grab a new image or drag and drop into it. 
You can add this to your image templates document as well. But you definitely want to have it set to word processing so you have the body text there. I'm going to insert a Page Break so it goes to a new page. I can paste in here and you could see now I've got this nicely setup Placeholder with the spacing before and after. It's centered. I can select that including that paragraph right there. Copy and then Paste into this document anywhere I want and replace the image. 
So you can use these techniques or kind of a combination of them to make it easier to place similar images throughout a large document. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 2 Responses to “Alternative Ways To Place Images In Pages Documents”

Judy Bloemer

3 years ago

Many great tips on using images with Mac Pages!

Tom Craig

Thanks, Gary, for explaining a subject that has frustrated me many times. You have shown me extremely useful tips on putting images into pages docs. I will definitely use them in my future docs!

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Alternative Ways To Place Images In Pages Documents

Comments: 2 Responses to “Alternative Ways To Place Images In Pages Documents”

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