Lesson C: Image Frames

• In the document called 2 Frames & Shapes, go to page 2.
• Continuing to use the Selection tool, click on the image, avoiding its center. When the cursor hovers over the image, you’ll see a pair of concentric circles. It’s those you should avoid, but only for the moment. That pair of circles is called the Content Grabber or, more commonly, the Donut.

The one task that you can do easily that affects both an image and its frame is to move it.

• Drag the image of ropes to the other page. However, if you try to resize it, you will resize the frame only. Make the frame smaller, and note that you’re actually cropping the image. Make the frame larger, and you may find that there’s excess frame now. But just like with text frames, you can double-click a corner handle of the frame, and the frame will fit to its content, the photo within.

Place an Image: Linking vs. Embedding

• Let’s add another image you can experiment with. Deselect the other one first by either clicking on nothing with the Selection tool or using the shortcut ⌘-shift-A/Ctrl-Shift-A.

• To place an image, go to File > Place…. In the resulting dialog box, navigate to where the exercise file is located (a folder called “2 Frames & Shapes”), then to the “Links” folder within it, and choose Pic2place.jpg. Double-clicking on that file or highlighting it and then clicking Open will load your cursor with the image. Drag diagonally across an open area on the document page, and the image will fit itself into the frame you’ve drawn. If the dinosaur relief on the right has lost its head, there are two things you should do. With the image still selected, reveal the Properties panel, and find the Frame Fitting section. The second button, Fit Content Proportionately, will reveal the entire image without distorting it. To prevent InDesign from making bad decisions like that again, go to the General Preferences (⌘-K/Ctrl-K) and disable Content-Aware Fit as a default.

We placed the image rather than pasting it to prevent it from being embedded in our document.

Image Frames and Their Dis-Contents

Even if you had changed the Content-Aware Fit preference earlier, you should still experiment with the Frame Fitting options. Resize the frame to make it vertical, cropping the picture a bit. Then try the first and last options. The first, Fill Frame Proportionately, will ensure the frame is filled with an image, but with the minimum crop. The last option, Content-Aware Fit, tries to figure out what the subject is and reveal that, hiding much else. In this case, it does very poorly.

Content Grabber (a.k.a. the Donut)

• With the image cropped, drag it by the Content Grabber in the center of the frame. You are recomposing the image within its frame. An alternative method that is consistent with text frames is double-clicking elsewhere in the frame, then dragging the now-selected image. Pressing the esc key selects the frame again. Clicking on the Content Grabber also selects the content.

  The full story about placing images and manipulating their frames can be studied in “Image Frames & Linked Images” (page 208).

A good friend of mine really hates the Donut. He’s good, and very fast, in InDesign. Sometimes, he accidentally grabs the Content Grabber when he intends to move an image, and accidentally dislodges the image from its frame! After saying something rude and using ⌘-Z/Ctrl-Z, he then has to press the esc key to select the frame. Then he can (more carefully) move the image by dragging it from somewhere other than its center.

Usually, he simply disables the Content Grabber completely. When he needs to adjust the image within its frame, he double-clicks it. Just as with a text frame, this selects the frame’s content. Pressing the esc key returns us to the frame.