Making Image Sizes Match In Pages

If you want to have several images in Pages or Keynote match in size exactly, but the original images are different size ratios, you can use resizing and masking to make them all exactly the same. You can also use this to make rectangular images square or some other dimensions.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Here's a problem that commonly comes up if you use Pages or even Keynote to layout images. Let's suppose that we've got three images here and we want to put them on the page and have them all be the same size. But they're not the same size. 
Let me show you by starting off here I'm in the document section with the document property selected. I'm going to turn off document body. So I'm going to turn it into a page layout document instead of, you know, a text document. So it has no body text there. This is what you use for brochures, posters, etc. So I'm going to drag and drop these three images here. You can see I have a vertical image, I've got something close to square but a little horizontal, and something that's much more horizontal here. 
Now I could simply scale all of these. Get them close. So let's like put this one here. Then I'm going to put this one next and I'm going to scale it up until it matches the same size. It's hidden behind here. We can go here. You can see how the guides are going to allow me to match the heights. The same thing here. I'm going to just drag it so the heights match. Now this maybe what you want. But in this case we want them to be all exactly the same size. Let's go even further and make them all square.
So we've got these images now and we want them to be the same size, the same square. How can we do that? Well, you've got to use a combination of techniques to do that. So the first thing we need to do is let's get them all to be big enough so that I can make them all square. So let's look at this image here. We can see if we go to Format and we go to Arrange and we look and we see it's 2.21 by 1.66. Let's say let's make them all at least 2 inches on every side. So since 1.66 is shorter than 2 inches we'll put the number 2 in there. It'll increase the entire size. So now we have something that's 2 inches high but 2.61 inches wide. 
We'll do the same thing with this one. The smaller dimension is height so we'll make that 2. This makes the width larger than 2. Now these are the same height. Two inches. This one though, the smaller dimension is width. So we'll make that one 2 inches wide. Which will make it more than 3 inches tall. 
Now we have the potential to make these all square but we're going to have to crop them in order to do that. So the way you crop is you go to Image here. We're going to Edit the Mask. Editing the mask allows us to change the dimensions of what's shown. So we can shrink the dimensions. Let's actually go and just shrink the right side here to make this 2 inches wide. So we'll make it exactly 2 inches wide. Now we've cropped out the right side which may not be what we want. But we can use a drag on the middle of the document or the middle of the image to drag and change so there's a little cropping on the left and a little cropping on the right. So now we have a 2 x 2 area here cropping out some on the left and some on the right. We hit Done and we have the 2 x 2 image there. 
Do the same thing here. Edit Mask and we will shrink this so it's 2 inches wide. We running into some issues here with the fact that it's snapping. So one way to get around that is we can move to Arrange. We're still staying in the Edit Mask mode here and we can set the size manually. This is a better way to do it because you can get it exact. So now we've set it to 2 x 2. We can adjust to get the cropping I want left and right. Done. 
Now the vertical image we can do the same thing. Edit Mask. We're just going to shrink the height. You can go over here to Arrange and actually manually enter the number in. We can adjust where we want it to be. In this case we do want to crop everything up out of the bottom here. 
So now we have three images and they are all exactly  2 inches by 2 inches. You can see here in the size. So now we can center this image and put these next to it. I'm going to use the arrow keys here and select this one and do Shift left twice and Shift right twice. So I have an even gap between both of them and all three of them are exactly the same size. We did that by adjusting the image size first and then adjusting the mask for them and cropping them as I wanted. You can do this with as many images as you need in order to get a nice even look on your page.

Comments: 3 Responses to “Making Image Sizes Match In Pages”

nick

7 years ago

Excellent tutorial Gary, thanks. I haven't looked yet but there must be a way to set guide lines that you can snap the photos to?

Gary Rosenzweig

nick: Yes. Pages includes a Guides feature. But as you can see in the video, you can often do just fine without setting those up.

Joseph L. Juliano

Cropping I was familiar with, the MASK in PAGES was a new concept to me. I have heard the term use in high end vector software but finding this available in PAGES has taken my page layout and publishing of memoirs to a new level. And fining your well thought out presentation was just the tip I needed. Thank you so much.

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Making Image Sizes Match In Pages

Comments: 3 Responses to “Making Image Sizes Match In Pages”

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