InDesign’s hidden gems: our top 5 for wrangling imagery3 minute read

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Following on from our 5 gems for wrangling Adobe InDesign text, here are what we believe are the BEST shortcuts when you’re working with imagery.

With a little concentration, you too can master your secret weapon

Being able to quickly wrangle imagery is a designer’s secret weapon.

Designers #ShineOn 💎

1. Grid images

In the same way you can add columns to a text box as you are drawing it out, hold the mouse down as you’re drawing a graphic box and tap the right arrow key to additional boxes into a grid.

Griding those images of cats has never been easier

2. Auto-fit

If you haven’t set up auto-fit to your graphic box in your templates, shift + option + command + e will fit your image to the picture box proportionally.

Stretch your fingers to hit shift + option + command + e

3. Default auto-fit

With no documents open, you can set the default auto-fit options for your image boxes for all your new documents.

  • Go to the Object menu and select Fitting
  • Then select Frame Fitting Options…
  • Turn on Auto-Fit and choose your preferred content fitting option – fit content proportionally is a good start!

Extra tip: This will apply to all new documents you create, but you can set the default for existing documents as well.

Birdy (the office cat) is perfectly positioned every time with auto-fit

4. Drop shadow

Option + command + m displays the drop shadow options for your image (and for text too).

Quickly open Effects to add a drop shadow with option + command + m

5. Locking, hiding & grouping

There are some great quick-fire keyboard shortcuts for locking (command + l), hiding (command + 3) and grouping (command + g) for image and text boxes. These can be un-done using the option + command version of the same shortcut (with the exception of grouping which is shift + command).

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