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T
tsalavrettas
Participant
December 6, 2017
Answered

InDesign Thumbnail Index

  • December 6, 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 670 views

Hello,

I am working on a lighting catalogue. Over the years, almost on a monthly basis, the client sends me new lighting fixtures photos to add to the catalogue.

In the first pages I have manually designed an index of all the listed photos with the name, code and page number.

At the moment, the catalogue and the index is very large, making any adding procedure very time consuming.

Is there a way to automate the thumbnail index design?

At least, it would be relieving if there was a way to have the correct page number below each thumbnail and not having to manually search for it.

Thanks in advance!

Panagiotis

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer Loic.Aigon

If you are working on a catalog, you may consider professional plugins. Not only it will automate your layout, take care of data updates and in your case, will update item page number information so you can build you own toc and have it updated easily.

Of course all of this can mostly be done natively (although updates can only be done with XML and the InDesign XML engine doesn't suit well for Catalogs) in InDesign but with a lot of clicks.

Feel free to get in touch for more details.

2 replies

Loic.Aigon
Loic.AigonCorrect answer
Legend
December 7, 2017

If you are working on a catalog, you may consider professional plugins. Not only it will automate your layout, take care of data updates and in your case, will update item page number information so you can build you own toc and have it updated easily.

Of course all of this can mostly be done natively (although updates can only be done with XML and the InDesign XML engine doesn't suit well for Catalogs) in InDesign but with a lot of clicks.

Feel free to get in touch for more details.

T
tsalavrettasAuthor
Participant
December 7, 2017

Hello again,

Thanks for your replies.Loic.Aigon​, can you please mention any professional plugin suitable for this work?

Thank you!

Loic.Aigon
Loic.Aigon
Legend
December 7, 2017

I use to work with EasyCatalog myself but this is one solution among others.

Pariah Burke
Community Expert
Pariah BurkeCommunity Expert
Community Expert
December 6, 2017

You could use Data Merge to populate the layout using an Excel spreadsheet or a database.

If you're new to Data Merge, check out my Pluralsight video course: http://abbrv.it/vidIDVDP

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