Getting Images To Stay With Text In Mac Pages

When you add images to a word processing document in Pages, you can choose to have it stay at the exact location on that page, or move with the text. A image can then be anchored to a space in the text, or set to Inline where it acts as a character in the text.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to get images to move with text in Mac Pages.
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Now when working in Mac Pages you may want to insert images into your document. Sometimes you want those images to stay right where you put them on that specific page where you added them. Other times you want the image to move around with the text so it stays with the same paragraph no matter what you add before that. So here I am in Pages and I'm working in a word processing document. Everything I'm going here is involving word processing. It's completely different if you're in Page Layout where you purposely place every single item. You can tell you're in word processing if you go to File, and you see Convert to Page Layout. That means you're, right now, in word processing mode. In word processing mode you've got a long text of body that goes from page to page to page throughout your entire document. You don't actually have to create text boxes at all. You just keep adding text and it will keep adding pages.
Now let's say that on page 2 here I want to insert an image. I want to put it maybe between these two paragraphs. I've got here on my desktop the document and also an image just ready to go. So I'm going to drag and drop this image into the document. I'm not going to worry about exact placement right now. I just want to put it in the general location that I want it to be. Now the first thing I see is it's too big. So I'm going to grab anyone of these handles here and drag to resize it to something more reasonable. It doesn't have to be perfect right now. I can continue to resize it later on. But this is approximately the size that I want. Now I'll position it where I want. Do I want it in the center of the page? Do I want it to the left or to the right? Let's put it over here to the right. I wanted it between these two paragraphs which, since I'm going to have it to the right, means I want it to be right at the beginning of this paragraph. So approximately right here. The paragraph starts there and then the image is to the right. 
Now let's take a look at the arrangement properties of this image. To do that with the image selected go to Format, like I am here, and then go to Arrange. There are two main options here. Stay On Page or Move With Text. Changing them doesn't really seem to change very much right away. But they fundamentally change how this image is handled from this point on. If I choose Stay On Page then this image is going to remain on page 2 of this document at this position. No matter what text I add before or pages I insert before this is going to remain right here on page 2, to the right, this far down from the top. However, if I select Move With Text then it's different. Now this image is anchored in the text. There's actually an anchor. If I had the image selected notice this little blue line with a circle on top. This is the point at which this image is anchored. Right here after the word guest and a period. So, it's going to always appear just after that. If I were to add some blank lines here at the top notice how the image moves down. It's always going to remain in the same position relative to this anchor. It doesn't necessarily mean it's going to remain on the same page. If I continue to add more lines and eventually I get to the bottom of the page and there's not enough room for the image, the image will pop onto the next page. The anchor, if I select it, is still going to be at the same location. There's simply not enough room here, after that anchor, for it to be on this page so it's on the next page. 
Now you can see this anchor here whenever you have the image selected. You could see if I select some text it's not there. But if I select the image it is there. If however I go to View and Show Invisibles, then the anchor will always be visible as well as all the spaces and paragraph breaks and other invisible characters. So it's a handy way if you have a lot of images to always have the anchors there whether or not the image is selected. 
Now if you want to change where that anchor is located there is no way to actually move the anchor itself. Instead you need to move the image. So if I grab the image and move it the anchor will actually change to the end of the line just before where the image appears. So if I release it here you could see the anchor is right there. If I drag it down a little bit more you could see now the anchor is right there. It's usually at the end of the line. But if I were to change the text, like add some words here, notice how the anchor stays put. It doesn't stay at the end of the line. It will stay actually there and it will position the image as best it can. So you can be assured that this image is going to appear as soon as possible after the anchor in the text. I could add whole pages of text before this, an entire paragraph including page breaks and everything, and this image will still appear on the next line right after the anchor after the word him right here. 
Now you do have another option. When you have Move This Text selected you could look at Text Wrap. This determines exactly how the text will wrap around the image. So I could, for instance, select Automatic which will let it flow here to the right or if I drag it over here it will flow to the left. If I move it into the middle and the image is small enough it will actually have the text flow around as long as there is enough space. I could also change this to Around so it automatically flows around no matter what. I could have it go Above and Below so it never puts any text to either side. I could have it set to None. The text will actually flow regardless of the image. So you could see the image is on top of it. 
However, there is one other one. In the middle here is one called In Line With Text. If you select that then the image is treated as a character in the text. The anchor is gone because the image itself is now the anchor. Right after the word would the image appears. So no matter what I do here it's always going to be right after would. You could see how it actually appears as a character in the text. It is a little easier to see if you shrink the image down to something small. Maybe it is a very small image. Just a symbol or something. You could treat it as a piece of the text. It will always move with the text and between the words would and not, for instance. If you want to move this you can Copy and Paste it like any other piece of text. So I'm going to Cut, Command X, and I want it to be between these two paragraphs. This is a typical way to use In Line With Text. Add a whole blank paragraph in-between two and put the image there as In Line With Text. Now it's just one element inside of its own paragraph which guarantees it will always be between this paragraph here and this paragraph here. I can even select the paragraph, not the image but the paragraph, I'll select after it. You could see the blinking cursor there. I'll do Shift, Backspace to select the one character or in this case the image there. Then under Format, Text I can actually say center the text in this paragraph which will actually center the image. So now I've got this centered image here that is its own paragraph. 
I could furthermore even select the paragraph again and do things like add spacing before or after the paragraph. So maybe 8 point before and 8 point after, just like that to create a nice buffer. Then this creates a really nice simple way to have an image between two paragraphs and always between two paragraphs. It's never going to effect the wrapping from the text or anything like that. It's the simplest way to have some image stay put between two paragraphs in your text. 
So I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: One Response to “Getting Images To Stay With Text In Mac Pages”

Daniel Joseph

3 years ago

Gary -- Thanks so much for this. When I got the e-mail I was actually in the process of inserting a picture into some text written with Pages, and my plan is to edit the document later, possibly adding or subtracting text and moving some around so that it will be important that the pictures move with the surrounding text. So what you talked about was exactly what I need.

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Getting Images To Stay With Text In Mac Pages

Comments: One Response to “Getting Images To Stay With Text In Mac Pages”

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