Migrating PS PDF images to Indesign

[Hammond44]

I have created 99 pages of images for a book in PS. They are also being saved as PDFs. How do I migrate them to InDesign to create the book?

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

Do you mean you've text in there? 

Why do you want to migrate it to InDesign? 

You could probably use Illustrator - but it would still be manual... 

Can you share sample files - on priv? My tool will, at some point, work with Photoshop - so your sample files could speed up that process...

[Hammond44]

Images and text for a book

[BobLevine]

File > Place

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

That's it. (Really, Bob, you should learn not to go on and on about these things. 🙂 )

The only minor caveat is that importing files with text may have any of a spectrum of issues with the font definition and resolution. If you did things right in Photoshop and the export, either the PSD or PDF should import seamlessly to ID. But — again, minor — don't be surprised if the text throws some problems; it may be better in some cases to import only images and re-do the text as InDesign elements.

[BobLevine]

Yeah, sometimes I just get a bit wordy and need to be put in my place. 🙂

Seriously, though, if you save from Photoshop as Photoshop PDF (PDP file extension will re-open the file in Photoshop) the text will retain its vector properties while it will be rasterized using PSD so there is a huge difference there.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

File > Place

By @BobLevine

That would be too easy.

If each PDF is a separate / final page - imposition can be done directly, without the need for embedding in the InDesign and exporting again.

Or Acrobat can be used to put all pages together. 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Yes, if the pages are "finished," no need to go to InDesign. At most, it might make good title, TOC, colophon pages to go along with the content pages in an assembled PDF.

But... if headers, footers, page numbers and an organized book structure are needed, pulling them into ID is the right move.