InDesign: How to Insert Images

‘Why is Indesign the opposite of intuitive? How do you input images?’

First of all, thank you for the good questions (you know who you are ;D)! And secondly, this tutorial assumes that you know how to set up an InDesign document. If not, let me know and I’ll get to work on creating a tutorial for that!

InDesign is very… frustrating to use, even when you know what you’re doing most of the time. In this tutorial, I will explain how I understand InDesign uses images, and go through two ways in which to insert pictures into the document. I will also cover the differences between keeping your image files linked, and embedding them along with the pros and cons for each. If, by the end, you’re still unsure about something please don’t hesitate to contact me through emails or social media! 🌈InDesign knowledge for all🌈

Without further ado, let’s get into it. I’ll try to explain this the best I can as it can get a little confusing, but the thing that’s important to know while using InDesign is that it ‘borrows’ any images that you insert unless told otherwise. For fear of me going on a tangent, more on this later.

Inserting Images

There is a ‘proper’ and a ‘lazy’ way to insert images and personally I prefer the lazy way but it’s always good to have options.

The Proper Method

I say ‘proper’ and it’s only because it uses the tabs at the top. If you travel up to the top of your screen and click ‘File’ and then move down to ‘Place’ (Ctrl+D is the short cut) your file explorer should open.

Select all of your desired images and then click open but then don’t click anything! Or you’ll deposit an image where you don’t want it. Now you should have your cursor with a mini image and a pair of brackets with the number of images that you’re holding, in my case it was (5). I couldn’t get my laptop to screenshot my cursor so forgive the phone pic.

Now you should drag your cursor to the upper left point of where you’d like to place your image and then click, it should appear more or less where you’d like it. It’s okay if it isn’t exact, I’ll go through how to move and resize images in a moment. If you selected more than one image, go ahead and deposit all of them where you need them.

The Lazy Method

If you’d rather not use the menus at the top, alternatively you can open your file explorer, select your images and then click and drag them into the document. The same rule for not clicking until you’re hovering above where you need the image applies, just for ease’ sake.

Moving and Resizing Images

This is where I begin to find InDesign frustrating. If you’re like me, the first time you used the programme you were confused as to why the images had a blue and an orange box around them and why the images didn’t re-size in a nice way, and that’s okay. InDesign isn’t designed to be user friendly… For some reason.

I call the blue box the ‘Bounding Box’ and the orange box, the ‘Image Box’, whether those are technical terms, I don’t know. The bounding box is the default box, it controls how much of the image you can see, so if the image box is bigger than the bounding box you’ll notice some cropping. If you double click on a picture with a bounding box it turns orange - into the image box, this primarily controls the image size. Meaning I spent a lot of my time in university changing the image box size and then double-clicking to change the bounding box size.

Thankfully, there is a way to change the size of both without all of that hassle. If you have the blue, bounding box visible and need to resize your image, hold down Ctrl + Shift, and click and drag from a corner to keep everything in proportion and change the image box at the same time. (If you're using big images then it may be bigger than the page, in which case use Ctrl + and Ctrl - to zoom in and out before resizing)

Again, if you have the blue bounding box visible, moving an image is pretty simple if you have the knack. When you hover over an image in InDesign there should be two circles in the very centre of it, for the love of your sanity please don’t move your image from there - it moves only the image box if you do. Instead, to move both boxes, select any part of the image that isn’t the circle and everything should move with you. If you’re trying to move your picture and the bounding box isn’t going with you, make sure you haven’t accidentally double-clicked to enable the orange image box - it’s caught me out a few times in the past.

Links - What Are They?

Now that all of your images are in place, InDesign is doing that ‘borrowing’ thing I mentioned earlier. What that means is that it ‘links’ to your original, or source, file and if that original file is moved to a different location in your file explorer, the link will be broken and InDesign won’t know where to find it. From what I understand, it’s a way of InDesign keeping the file size down and making it easier on your computer or laptop, so that you don’t take up too much memory or battery power by using your high-quality images - this is also why your images appear pixelated while using the programme.

Pros and Cons

InDesign is designed to work in tandem with Photoshop, meaning that if you’re using links, you will be able to make changes to your image in photoshop and these changes will automatically be transferred to the InDesign document. Also if you use links your InDesign file won’t take up as much space as if you used ‘embedded’ images.

The cons that go along with this are if you were to move an image, or a whole series of images from one folder to another in your file explorer, InDesign won’t understand where to find them unless you show it where they’ve been moved to. It’s an easy fix but is quite a hassle if you’re in a hurry. This also means that if you need to transfer your InDesign file to another computer, it will have an absolute fit. Embedding images, and the ‘Package’ option, are both two different fixes for that issue but that(Packaging an InDesign file) is for another tutorial. So, to combat all the palaver without embedding, I would recommend collecting all the images that you’ll need for your InDesign document in their own folder beforehand, and to be very mindful not to move them. Having the images linked is very handy though, and I do recommend them.

How to Use Links

Links can be very useful. Say you’re unhappy with the way an image looks and you need to change it, you simply need to carry out your changes on Photoshop, or another image editor like Clip Studio, and save over your image. This will then tell InDesign that there’s been an update and the programme will go into ‘error’ mode. You just need to click on the yellow danger sign and it will refresh. Perfect for drawing glasses and hats on a sad elf.

Embedding Images - What is it?

Embedding an image basically means that InDesign takes the image and inserts it into the document instead of ‘borrowing’ it like usual.

Pros and Cons

The good thing about this is that you can do whatever you like to the original image (you could move it to the furthest recesses of your file explorer, or I guess trash it) and InDesign will still have its own copy to use. It means that you can send the file to a different computer and all the images will still be in the document ready to print. Good huh?

The downside is that you can’t edit these images at all and, especially if you’re using big, detailed images, the file size skyrockets pretty quickly.

How to Embed an Image

Depending on what your set-up looks like, you may either have an icon of two lil chainlinks linking together (pictured below), or the word ‘Links’ somewhere on the right-hand side. If you can’t find either, travel to the bar at the top, select ‘Windows’ and then ‘Links’ (Or Ctrl + Shift + D) and the links tab will pop open. Here you’ll be able to see all of your inserted images.

If you then select all the images that you wish to embed in the menu (click the top one, go to the bottom one, hold shift and click to select all of them 👉👉), right-click on them, select ‘embed link’, and a square/triangle symbol thing should appear by them. That’s it! They’re all embedded quite snugly into your document now, they’re not going anywhere.

Conclusion

And that ties up how to insert images into InDesign. If you found the way I have explained this easy to follow or just generally more helpful than some other tutorials out there, and if you have any, and I mean any questions regarding InDesign or Photoshop, please don’t hesitate to get in touch (my email is: mortdraws@gmail.com) and I will do my level best to get a tutorial out to you as soon as possible. Or maybe something in here didn’t quite make sense to you, that’s perfectly fine, contact me and I’ll see if I can help!

I hope that you were able to take something away from this tutorial, and hopefully, InDesign doesn’t seem like so much of a monster to you now (cos it is a big ol’, confusing monster). Thank you for sticking with it and reading this far, I know it was a long post!

See you next time,

Mort.

How To Not Be Confused While Using Etsy

In this post, I will be discussing the initial struggles that I came up against while opening my Etsy shop, and then, later on, I have included a section about printing my products with Awesome Merch and Mixam Print. If either of these things is something that you'd like to know more about then this is the blog post for you! Feel free to skip to parts that interest you the most.

Starting up Etsy

As you may know, I've recently opened up an Etsy shop. I thought that I would make a post about the initial struggles that I've come up against in the hope that my experiences can help someone who is currently thinking about starting a shop there.

Please bear in mind that I had never used Etsy before this point and so, other than the research that I had done, I was going in blind.

Upon creating an Etsy account I had already made a mistake (which a lot of people won't make) and that was to assume that the account I had created was a store account. It wasn't. I had named my personal account Mort Draws like a silly billy and wondered where the store part was. You do in fact need to click on the 'Sell on Etsy' button and you'll then be taken into the process of creating a shop. Like I said, I don't think other people would make this mistake, but I'm putting it here just in case. This did mean, I then had to change my personal page to my actual name and my shop name to MortDraws.

My main confusion was with the auto-renewal option while you're setting up your listings, as the information on that screen was ambiguous to me.

I had read in my research that Etsy takes 16p + 9% per listing, which I understood as 16p to list your product for four months and then 9% of each sale. From the listing screen: "Each renewal lasts for four months or until the listing sells out." To me, this reaffirmed what I had thought initially wherein I paid 16p for the four months, or until I ran out of products. I was mistaken.

As I began selling items, I saw Etsy take 16p under 'auto-renewal sold' to refresh the listing every time someone bought something, it took me some time but I did eventually find the explanation: "If you list multiple quantities of the same item, the initial listing fee will be $0.20(16p), and the listing will be automatically renewed at $0.20 after each of the items sells." Or more clearly: "Auto-renewed listings automatically repost a listing if it’s purchased from your shop, saving you the time of manually reposting products." So, in conclusion, you pay 16p to list your products, and then an additional 16p each time you sell an item plus the 9% for tax, transaction and payment processing fees.

Now, I hadn't considered all this while pricing up my listings so make sure you do!

The next thing you should consider while setting up your listing is the weight of your product once packaged and ready to go, I didn't do this and it stung me good. If you're based in the UK, the Royal Mail has a helpful list on postage costs both within and outside of the UK, which I did look at but then guessed the weight of my products? Yeah, don't do that, please check! I did have the common sense to measure the envelopes at least and was expecting a £1.15 charge for a large letter but I didn't weigh it beforehand so my charge was actually £1.64. If I'd actually checked I would have been able to incorporate that into my initial costings while pricing up.

Other than these couple of hiccups (which are simply my misjudgement on interpreting information) my overall experience on Etsy has been rather positive! Once I'd found their help guide, it was quite useful, and they had great suggestions on how to take pictures of your products while setting up your listings. It's largely an easy to use platform and it was smooth to set up and start selling.

Getting Products Printed

Since it ties in nicely to starting up a shop, I'll mention it now. For the two products I have, I used a different printing company for each. For my prints and business cards, I used Awesome Merch because they offer double-sided business cards and were pretty well known on my university course, and for my comic, I used Mixam Print as they specialise in book printing, and I had heard very positive things about them from some of my peers. My experience with both was excellent and I'll walk you through how it went.

Awesome Merch

At the time of my order, Awesome Merch had a deal on for 100 business cards for £5, and I thought I would test out the overall quality by ordering prints as well to make the order more worthwhile. I downloaded their template PSD files and got my files ready before I submitted my order, I did need photoshop in order to do this. They allow you to specify a split in designs for a little extra, so I used that to order four different print designs, however, because my business cards were part of a deal I had to order two quantities of them in order to receive two different designs.

Now I needed to upload the images. Since I'd ordered two quantities of business cards I assumed that there would be two slots to upload to (foolishly I didn't look at the whole page first). I uploaded my first design and scrolled to see only the slot for my prints remaining! I uploaded all four of the prints' files without trouble and went back to the card slot to upload the other files but there wasn't an option to upload more. I thought 'no worries, I'll delete the files and reupload all of them'. Well, they deleted fine, however when I reuploaded them the website buffered... And buffered... And buffered. In a state of panic, fearing that I'd messed up my first order, I ran to customer services and explained what had happened and they took care of it right away! I gave the correct files through email and everything worked out fine. My one gripe would be that processing and postage took a while, however with the pandemic still effecting peoples' work I can forgive that. Overall, a very positive experience with Awesome Merch, they handled my fumble with grace and I cannot fault them at all. Their product quality is superb, and they even offer a sample pack for £2. I'll be eager to try out their other products in the future.

Mixam Print

Mixam print turned out to be cheaper to print books with than a lot of other companies! They do offer template files but I didn't use them because the size I required was a custom one. They provide a free sample pack, and an option to have a test print for £4.50 (as long as your project fits into the guidelines; mine didn't). Because I knew what to expect this time around, I had no issue with uploading my files. Processing and postage were exceptionally fast, and I was really pleased with the quality of paper and colour vibrancy. I only ordered a small quantity as a test, and I was pleased to find out that they had printed me a few extra! Due to their specialisation in printing books, excellent print quality, and quick turn around I will be returning to Mixam in the future for sure.

So that's my experience so far! I don't have many listings as of yet, but I have a few things I'm working on which I'll be so excited to print. I have also noticed that there's an option to sell digital copies of work on Etsy which is definitely something that I'd like to try out soon! I hope this has been a helpful post if you're looking to sell on Etsy or get some products printed, and I hope I have explained the costs a little better than the sites that I used for research.

Etsy's guide on how to open a shop is here.

A link to Mixam's site is here, and Awesome Merch is here.

My Etsy shop is here!

If you have any questions about what I've written here feel free to DM or email me.

Thanks for reading!

Mort