Mac Pages Tricks for Reusing Image Settings

If you want to have a lot of images in your Pages document and they all need to be the same size and other attributes, you can use a variety of techniques to reuse attributes over tens or hundreds of images. This same technique works for Keynote as well.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can reuse image settings easily in Pages. 
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So let's add an image to this Pages document. I'm going to click on Media, here, to do that. Go to Photos and then I'm going to select a photo here, let's choose this one, and then I'm going to resize it and customize the photo to get it to look just like I want. So I'll make it about this size here. Pretty small so we can see a bunch of examples at the same time. Let's go and choose a picture frame border, scale it down a bit, choose a shadow, set everything else up just like I want. I can even set the text wrapping to work like I want. So, let's go to arrange here and I'll choose above and below like that so I can put it in the center like that. I could use Inline With Text or any of these other ones, or Stay on Page. I could, maybe, adjust this spacing around it a bit. Now I've got my image just like I want. 
Except now when I want to add a second image I want it to look exactly the same. But if I go to Media, Photos again and I select another image like this one, it starts off from scratch and now I have to make all those adjustments a second time. What if I need to add ten, twenty, or a hundred images to the document and I want them to look basically the same. I have to repeat all those steps each of those times. 
One thing you can do to get part of the way there is to Copy and Paste the Style. So, I can select this image here, go instead of to Edit where you can use Copy, go to Format where you can Copy Style or Option Command C. Then select the other image and Format Paste Style, or Option Command V, and paste the Style. This won't resize the image. It won't change things like the arrangement format here. Notice it is above and below for this image but this one remains automatic. But it does set all the other things up like the border, drop shadow, and other elements. So now you just have to resize everything and get it to match. 
Now a similar thing you could do is create a Custom Style. So under Format, Style you've got Styles here at the top with an image selected you have Image Styles. You may be familiar with using Styles for text. Styles for images work in a similar way. So you could see some default ones here. I could click on the Arrow to go to the right and then I have some blank slots. I could click the Plus button with this image selected and it's going to put that Style into this slot here. So now when I choose another image to Add, like that, I can now click on this Style and it will make a lot of those choices for me. You could see I have this same border. I have the drop shadow and other things. I don't have the same size and I don't have the same text wrapping. So it only gets me part of the way there. I could go and resize this to fit. It's not that hard to do and then go ahead and change the text wrapping and all of that and have two identical images. 
So having a custom Style is useful if you want the same basic things like border, shadow, and other properties but want to have a different size and maybe are using the default object placement text wrap each time or you want to set a separately for each image. 
Now another technique that you could do, something that goes back years and years and works in all sorts of different apps is to simply make a duplicate of this image and then change just the image leaving all the other properties the same. One way to do that is to go to Edit, and Copy or Command C, and then go to Edit, Paste or Command V. Then get an exact duplicate of this image here. Now, all I need to do is swap the image out. I can do that a couple of ways. One is to go to Format, Image and there is a Replace button. I click the Replace button and I get a File Open Dialogue. So I have to choose a file. But I can actually go on the left sidebar here, under Media, choose Photos and then select the photo that way and Insert and you could see I get the photo in there but it's got all of the other properties. The Style is all set the same. The Arrangement is set the same and of course you can see the image size is the same. I could do the same thing using Replace and then let's go to the Desktop and select one of these two images here and I could Replace it with that. 
What would be even nicer to do is if I can Drag and Drop. If I take one of these images here in the Finder or drag from the Photos App into Pages and try to put it in here look what happens. It inserts it as a new image. That's not what I want. I want to replace this image with what I'm dragging into it. You could do that by setting this as a place- holder. So with this selected go to Format and then Advance and then Define as Media Placeholder. You can see there's a keyboard shortcut for it if you want to use this often. Then when you do it doesn't change the image in there but you get this little indicator at the bottom right that this is now a Dropzone. I could drop this into here and change the image easily. Once you do though it's no longer a placeholder. But I get the desired result with all of the Style settings and Arrangement settings and of course the size being the same. I can repeat this over and over again. 
I mentioned that there is another way to duplicate an image and that is, instead of copy and paste, hold the Option Key down and Drag the image. This will create a duplicate. It works the same way in a lot of different apps. Option Drag usually duplicates what you're dragging. Now I have another image here. I can use the keyboard shortcut Control Option Command i to make that a placeholder and then quickly drag and drop another image into it. 
Now this technique will quickly allow you to easily reuse image settings throughout your document. But what happens when you start a new document? Create a new document one of the things you can do is Copy and Paste from the old document. So I can go into this document. Say I like how I set images in this one. I can copy it and then go into the new document and paste it in here. Now I've got everything set the same way and I can replace this image to get going. But instead of always going back to an old finished document and grabbing the image out of there you can create yourself a Clips document to hold things like this for later use. So I can select this image here and Copy it and let's create a new document and you can create a regular blank document or maybe a page layout document will be convenient since the body text won't get in the way and then create. Then in this document here I can paste this image in and then with it selected I can set it to be a Media Placeholder so it is ready for Drag and Drop. Maybe I even want to have variations. So I'm going to Option Drag here to create a duplicate and I'll double click to crop and I'll make this one more of a square image. Maybe sometimes I want to use a wide rectangle and sometimes I want to use a square. So I've got both of these images here and I'll just Save this as my Clips here. I'll put it on the Desktop but you probably can put it in your Documents folder or wherever you keep your Pages documents.
Now when I'm working on a document and it's time to insert an image all I need to do is open up this Clips document, find what I want, like let's say I want to do this square image here, Copy it. I can Close this document here. Back in my original I can paste and now I've got my image right here ready to go. I can Drag and Drop the actual image I want in there. You can store a whole bunch of different image clips here. All sorts of borders and sizes and everything. You can even label them. Create a text box. You know, call them something like this and place it right above. You can have more information in there like the actual arrangement settings and all that so you know you get the right one. You can also store other things in here. For instance, here's a group of 5 elements, two black lines, a gray box, two pieces of text. It's all setup like I want to use it, maybe, in different documents and it's grouped together so I can select it once, Copy, go to another document like this, Paste it in. Even the text wrapping is setup there on that gray box so it wraps just like I want. 
So really any elements or groups of elements that you find yourself reusing from document to document you can put into this Clips Document or a variety of different Clips Documents for different purposes to easily be able to access them again in the future without having to recreate all of the settings every time. 
So I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 3 Responses to “Mac Pages Tricks for Reusing Image Settings”

Bent Tjornemark

12 months ago

As always an instructive video. I save my clip document in Templates.

Diana

Lots of excellent ideas, but the best seems to be the oldest—copy and paste. (Or duplicate)

nick

Gary: too bad there's no way to name custom image styles. I'm imagining it can be difficult to chose the correct one if there are multiple custom styles.

Comments Closed.

Mac Pages Tricks for Reusing Image Settings

Comments: 3 Responses to “Mac Pages Tricks for Reusing Image Settings”

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