Saal Digital Templates Opening in Photoshop Instead of InDesign

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
November 5, 2024
3 replies
483 views

Saal Digital offers templates to use in Indesign. When you double click on the template in Saal, it goes directly to Photoshop in File Viewer. Is this correct? How do I get it to Indesign?

Saal Digital offers templates to use in Indesign. When you double click on the template in Saal, it goes directly to Photoshop in File Viewer.

I sent screenshots to Saal of this Fileviewer, they told me to go to Indesign so I go to Indesign and share my screen with the support person who then proceeds to just import one image directly from my laptop into Indesign. I ask the question but I need my Saal template for the photo book. The agent then disappears and closes the chat.....

I do keep getting error message in Indesign saying there might be a plug in issue. I have installed, deinstalled and reinstalled, done a shutdown on my laptop.. still nothing.

Now I am none the wiser and trying to seek help here in the community.

I just want to get a photobook with images which I have scanned.

Import and export

johnm57411559

Participating Frequently

Yes, that happened to me too but I just festered, this Saal site is really hard work.

I think I sorted it, but have no real understanding of how.

J

jacqueline_9590Author

Participant

Glad you managed to sort it. Which photo books did you go for?

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

What format are the templates in? What is the complete filename of the template, including the extension?

It sounds as if these are page templates, not file templates — JPG or PSD image files that are meant to be laid in to an InDesign document to provide a guide on a page by page basis... and not a complete document template that's opened as a starting point.

[Other comments deleted — search found the wrong website.]

Okay, having found the right site and drilled down until I found templates —

Note that there are TWO options for each template, "PSD" (which would be for Photoshop, and open automatically there unless you use it as a layer template in InDesign) and "ID" (which downloads an InDesign IDML file, which should open directly in InDesign. I suggest you may be clicking on the wrong link; they are very close together and there is no good distinction between them.

These guys also seem fantastically expensive to me. Shutterfly, for example, is typically $35 or so for a photobook, which falls into my general cost sense for these things. Saal's prices are in the $150 range and there are $3-400 items on the same catalog list.

I'd shop around. Especially if their support is so weak as to not be able to expect/explain the above or give you more than a few moments of 'help.' For those prices, they should fly a pro out to tutor you through it.

J

jacqueline_9590Author

Participant

Sorry, just seen your reply. I got really busy in November and didn't return to the photo book project until December.
Finally I found out that you are correct when you refer to the separate PSD and ID templates. I kept clicking on PSD when finally I understood to click on ID. If you don't understand it you can mistake it for one template.
In the end, I don't know if purchasing a subscription for ID was worth it. I mainly did it for photo quality but I couldn't work out how to do simple tasks in ID even after watching YouTube. I wanted to automate all images to the same size but couldn't. In the end I had to do it manually.
I couldn't work out by how much I was distorting the photos even after using the features to automatically make it larger without distorting.
I made the deadline of delivery of two photos by the skin of my teeth. They were a 60th Birthday present to my husband.
I meant to do 5 photo books via Saal but did 2 since I didn't know if I was doing a good job on sizing and quality.
I chose 2 different types of of photo books. A hard copy and a soft copy.
I have to say although they were expensive I was happy with the quality. It matched my expectations. The photos and information were family trees dating back to the 1700's.
The hard copy acrylic was brilliant with my own image on the front.
I got a bit creative with the soft copy and it turned out ok especially with the hand drawn family tree diagrams on flatbed.
I chose the photobooks size close to the scrapbooks size which I was trying to replicate.

The saal website kept crashing at 2am as I was approaching my deadline... but with perserverance I made it.
Of course my husband has no idea how much time and money this took before I even completed the photobooks for printing.

Will I use Saal again? Yes, they weren't great with software support but always responded quickly.
Was it worth using ID, for me probably not as I don't know if it gave me top notch photo quality.
For the soft copy book I ended up dragging photos directly from the folder into Saal and it appeared okay.

The family just spent Christmas in NY and I was thinking to do a soft copy photobook from Saal. Bearing in mind these two photobooks were my 1st ever photobooks 😀