InDesign Question

[Mike Teezie]

I don't know how silly this is going to be, but here we go. I am a photographer, and I what I am looking for is a way to simplify my album process.

Currently, I lay out all my albums in Photoshop. I made some templates in Illustrator, saved them as jpgs, and I just size the photos to the templates in PS. This is incredibly time consuming.

My question is, if I made the templates in InDesign, how would it be different? really, what I'm asking is, can I make something like iPhoto books, where there are image "zones" and I just drop images in there from Bridge, and all the resizing can be handled in InDesign?

Or if you can think of a better way, lay it on me. I'm a one man show here, and making my workflow more efficient is key.

As always, thanks in advance.

 

[xfiftyfour]

I believe InDesign CS3 allows you to batch place now by "loading" the cursor. In other words, you could make your templates with empty image areas, and when you're ready to make an album, you could go to File>Place (Apple+D), and select all of the images you want to place. Your cursor will now show small thumbnails that you can browse through using the arrow keys, and then just click the image areas when you're showing the image you want placed there. You could then grab all of the image boxes and go to Object>Fitting>Fit Content to Frame or Fit Content Proportionally to batch resize quickly. For any cropping, you could go back and tweak individual images if you needed to by using the frame to crop unwanted areas...follow?

Is that what you're looking for? It's a little hard to be sure without knowing exactly how large your albums are, how you use them, or how much post-processing (cropping, mainly) that you do to your images.. but it seems like this would save you time.

 

[Doctor Q]

A picture (or a tutorial video in this case) is worth a thousand words.

 

[JasonElise1983]

idk if you have cs3, but InDesign (CS1 and up i believe) remembers the size that is there. So, if you made a template with an image in there that is size properly...if you replace that image, indesign will make the next one the same size. but by replace, i literally mean using the "replace" button.

-JE

 

[xfiftyfour]

A picture (or a tutorial video in this case) is worth a thousand words.

I knew there was a video out there! Why couldn't I find that?

Anyways, yes, that does make the feature easier to understand than my garbled paragraph.

 

[Mike Teezie]

A picture (or a tutorial video in this case) is worth a thousand words.

Thank you so much Dr. Q, and everyone else. This is literally exactly what I was looking for.

Now all I have do is build my templates which shouldn't take me long at all!

Another question. Would it be advantageous to lay my templates out using the Book format? If I did, could I exchange one saved template page with another?

 

[zarathustra]

Save out a document with all your designs on master pages. Then open a copy and just drag and drop the particular designs you want to use for your document.

Books are useful, but personally I wouldn't use it the way you described it.

 

[Mercsadies]

If you have the full suite - you may want to try "making a contact sheet" through Bridge with your already made InDesign template.

It's what I do to make proof books.