Placing LOTS of pics in yearbook

[wcervera]

Please help! I dont want to place each of the 125 pics I have for a yearbook individually.

What is the fastest way to make my grid (say about 20 pics per page) and have images auto flow into the layout?

[Derek Cross]

Check out the Gridify feature.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qH3EjcLafRw

[Willi Adelberger]

Select all images for a page, draw a rectangle while holding the filled curser and with the arrow keys click to increase/decrease rows and columns. InDesign chooses the gap you have choosen for that page for text (even if you have no columns, a gap setting exists). 

[Eugene Tyson]

Bonus tip:

The gap is decided by the setting for the columns

Go to Layout>Margins and Columns and set the column setting to 0 or 1mm or 2mm or whatever you want the gap to be.

[Scott Falkner]

If you have a Parent Page with empty frames for your images you can add enough of them as pages to your document. Say your layout is five rows of four images, making 20 ups ages to a page. Add eight pages, giving you 160 empty frames. 
Now go to File > Place and select your 150 images. The cursor will load all 150 images, click on an empty frame to place an image. Click, click,click times 150 and they are placed. They will be loaded and placed based on the filename, so name them the order in which they will place. e.g. Abrams_Aaron.tif down to Zygax_Zachariah.tif.

[Frank1241]

I'm in the same situation. Now is there a way to auto place the loaded images on the cursor into the empty frames?

[Barb Binder]

Yes, see your post here: https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/automatically-placing-images-18-from-a-file-into...

~Barb

[wcervera]

Thank you all so much for your answers, it was actually quite easy to accomplish 🙂 Thanks!

Now I have to figure out how to autoflow all of the names under the pics, but I guess that is a different thread!

[BobLevine]

You could have added the names to the metadata and automatically generated captions that way.

[Eugene Tyson]

It's not that arduous.

My first yearbook I did in quark about 22 years ago.

All the images were supplied as actual photos, no digital then.

All images had to be scanned in a drum scanner.

All captions were inserted by hand, no meta data then.

I remember there was over 1000 images. All sorted and catalogued by hand. 

There was two of us on it. One typesetting and I was the one doing all the photoshopping and scanning.

Part of the scanning was naming the files with the students that were in the photo so the typesetter could get that info 

Nowadays, doing a yearbook is a cinch.

As @BobLevine says, metadata can help you out, but you'd be as quick doing it by hand in the layout.

You can still generate the text frames under the photo automatically using the Caption feature.