Hi, I'm Erica Gamet with InDesign Secrets. In this video, I'm going to show you how
to place one image inside multiple frames inside of InDesign. On this page, I
have several different graphics frames ready for images to be placed inside. And
I can tell they're graphics frames because they have the blue X in the middle of
them. But what I want to do is place one image inside all of these, so I get sort
of this windowpane effect. To do that, I need to create what's called a compound
frame. I'm going to select all the frames on my page, go up under the Object menu,
down under Paths and choose Make Compound Path. And when I do that, you
can see that I now have one big X that basically tells me that's one big image
frame. They're still sort of separate, but it's going to act as one frame. Now I can
go up under my File menu, under Place and choose an image I'd like to place.
There's a nice picture to be looking at outside your window. And since I have
Replaced Selected Item already selected, it will automatically put this image
inside that frame we just created. I'm gonna go ahead and click open…and it
drops it inside. Now it's not quite the image that I was hoping to see. What
happened was, it placed it at the size of the image and it's too big. So I need
to head up to the Object menu, down to the Fitting sub-menu and say Fill Frame
Proportionally. Now it fits so that the image fills the entire frame.
Now remember this compound frame acts as just any other regular image frame. So I
can actually use my Content Grabber to click on the image and manipulate it in
any way. Like I might want to hold down my Shift key, maybe the Option or the Alt key
and just drag, just to make it a little bit bigger, and I can also move
this around inside the frame. Let's just frame that up nicely so we can see everything.
Beautiful. On my next page I have a series of circles. In this case,
I'm going to place an image and sort of position it where I want it to be and
then we're going to paste it inside our compound path. So let's go up to the File
menu and choose Place and grab our image and
I'm not going to Replace Selected Item…just gonna say open. And I'm going to
just click and drag, sort of on top of these circles that are here. I kind of
want to get an idea of where everything needs to be sitting. I can also send that
to the back…so that I can see my image sort of back behind those circles. And
I'm doing that because I want to make sure that all the components of this
compound path are in place before I make a compound path. So I'm going to
choose the Selection tool and just sort of move these images around. Now I do have white
fills on those circles. It makes them easier to see but also harder to see the
image back behind. When I've got it about where I want it I'm gonna leave it and
I'm going to Command- or Control-X to cut that image. Now I'm going to go ahead and
select all of my circles, go up under the Object menu, down under Paths, Make
Compound Path. And now I've got my compound path ready to drop my image
inside. I'm gonna go up to the Edit menu and choose Paste Into, and it pastes it
into that path exactly where it was when I copied it. Again, you're not stuck with
this. You can go ahead and use the content grabber and move that image just
like you would in any other frame.
On a new page, I'm going to go ahead and place an image and then draw some frames
on top of that to place that image into. I'm gonna go up to the File menu and choose Place
and click Open…and I'm just going to go ahead and drag this out. And I want to
draw some frames on top of this image. Now I want to make sure they're easy
to see, so I'm gonna make sure that my stroke color and my size are easy enough
to see. Now I just want to draw out some regions that I want this image to fill.
So I'm going to go ahead draw out some squares. As I'm drawing
them, I can actually see how they're coming together. I can use my Smart
Guides to guide me. And make sure the family gets in its own little frame here.
I'll draw that out very roughly. Then I'm going to use the Selection tool, select
the image, Command- or Control-X to cut that, select all those frames, go up under
the Object menu, Paths, Make Compound Path, and choose Edit, Paste Into.
And there you go! There are a couple ways to take one image and put them inside
multiple frames inside your InDesign document.
Well, I certainly hope you found this tip helpful. Be sure to check out InDesignSecrets.com for thousands of
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"InDesign Magazine." Thanks for learning with us!