Adobe InDesign experts - image area question

Factual Questions
1

We have a document template in Adobe InDesign (no choice there, it’s an external vendor using it) that contains an optional image area.

We would like for the image area to have a fixed width, and to allow the depth to be “free”, i.e. the depth would be based on whatever the proportions of the actual image are.

The external vendor who is hosting this template says it is not possible, that both the width and the depth of the image area have to be fixed. The only options are:

  1. the template can crop the image to fit the “box” of the image area, so that a tall image would get cropped vertically, or a wide image would get cropped horizontally; or

  2. the template can fit the image into the space by making it small enough so that the biggest dimension fits in the “box” of the image area. So a tall image would be very narrow, and a wide image would be short (which is fine except that the full image area is still there, just part of it is empty).

Is what we want (2nd paragraph above) possible in InDesign within one template? We don’t have any experts on staff here who could help us with this.
Roddy

2

I won’t claim expert status but I do use InDesign on a daily basis. I’m not sure that what you want is possible, if I’m understanding it correctly. Both the page dimensions and the frame containing the image would have to have fixed dimensions (which are of course adjustable— the page dimensions by adjusting the “Document Setup” info and the frame by simply clicking and dragging the corners, unless the designer has locked its position on the template).

But if you mean you want the frame and page size to resize automatically to accommodate a long image, I don’t know of a way to do that.

Assuming the designer hasn’t locked the frame position you do have some options on how the image fills the frame, but I’m not sure if any of them are what you’re after. If you place an image that’s larger than the frame it inhabits, the image will initially be cropped. Your other frame “Fitting” options are:

a) Fit frame to content - will adjust the frame to whatever the dimensions of the original photo are. (For a large photo, this may cause the frame to be larger than the page it’s on.)

b) Fit content proportionally - will do what you describe in (2) above. Fits the entire image into the frame, which may include some empty space.

c) Fill frame proportionally - similar to (2), but doesn’t result in any empty space. Resizes the content to fill the frame as much as possible while maintaining the same proportions. If the image is of different proportions from the frame, part of it will be cropped (either horizontally or vertically).

In Windows you get to these options by right-clicking the frame and selecting “Fitting” (or select the frame and click Object > Fitting) —not sure about Macs.

To be clear, none of these will affect the length of the page itself, so if the image is long enough to extend past the bottom margin it will still be cropped when printed unless you change the page length (and use longer paper).

Not sure if that helps at all. (If I misunderstood your goal, I apologize.)

3

Thanks, VT. It sounds like a) is closest to what we want. I don’t mind having an upper depth limit, if the image area can shrink for a shorter image. We can make set the maximum depth to allow for 95% of cases, and manually crop the images in the other cases. The main thing in this document is that the width of the image is always the same.
Roddy