Placing and scaling images from a loaded cursor appear as empty frames

[DKingDesigner]

The latest release of InDesign seems to have broken a tool that I have used a lot. Loading up a cursor with several images and then click and dragging to place the images in matching scaled frames. Now, when I do that, the image itself disappears from the frames as I click and drag, so that I then have to go back and select all the frames and use the fit content proportionally to frame to get the images to fit the frames. Is anyone else experiencing this behavior? Is it supposed to be a feature? If so, is there some way I can turn it off so that I can go back to scaling images when I place them? It's really hard to line up a group of images and properly scale them when I can't see them. (I'm using 15.02 on Windows 10.)

[Mike Witherell]

Have you tried trashing preferences and restarting InDesign, which is troubleshooting's first thing to try?

Also, are you familiar with Grid-Placing, aka Gridify-Place which builds rows and columns of equally sized and spaced frames that your pictures all fill into?

To import all the loaded graphics in a grid, start dragging, and press the arrow keys to determine the number of rows and columns. Use the Up Arrow key and Down Arrow key to change the number of rows and the Left Arrow key and Right Arrow key to change the number of columns. Release the mouse button to place the grid of images.

To change the spacing between frames, press Page Up or Page Down or hold down Ctrl (Windows) or Command (Mac OS) while pressing the arrow keys.

To change the spacing between frames, hold down Ctrl (Windows) or Command (Mac OS) while pressing the arrow keys.

At any rate, read about it in the Help system under the topic of placing graphics. 

Finally, a long-time annoyance with InDesign is that the screen does not properly update to show the image in the frame. It will often appear empty. I usually just refresh the screen to provoke it to redraw completely by zooming in or out a step or pressing, IIRC, Shift+F5. Some say to click off the little Rocket Ship icon in order to turn off GPU acceleration, a feature that often accounts for screen problems.

[DKingDesigner]

Thanks for responding. I rarely have a use for something like gridify, so I forget the shortcuts for it, and it's just easier to do it the old way than refresh my memory on the rare occasion it would be useful. My current application thea pushed my annoyance to the level where I came to the forum is a 2-page list of 60 or so DVDs. I can't load the cursor with all of them at once, so I'm not sure gridify would be helpful.

However, this is just simple image placing that I'm having problems with. I've been using InDesign since version 1, so I'm no nube here. It's only recently that this has been happening to me. This is just a simple drag and drop a bunch of images into InDesign (or even using the place command), and then I drag the cursor to place the image at the size I want it, and the image disappears (whether I'm doing one or many). Sometimes a portion of the image shows, but it appears to me that the drag is sizing the frame and not the importing picture, and the image is somewhere else offset from the frame and at its full non-scaled size (as if I had done a copy and paste into where only a corner of the image copied overlapped the frame I'm pasting into). I have to select the frames and use the fit commands to get the images to show, so I don't think it's a redraw issue. It's the weirdest behavior, and in all the years I've used InDesign, I've never had this happen. I can't even imagine why anyone would want it to work that way, which is why I'm thinking it's a bug and not a feature. Though some of the things that Adobe rolls out as features sometimes bewilders me.

I do know they are rolling out a 15.0.3, which is yet to be avaible in the US, and I'm having serious performance issues with the current release, so I may just have to wait and see if this new update fixes this too.

[Mike Witherell]

Did you try the other 2 remaining suggestions?

[Laubender · Accepted solution]

Hi DKingDesigner,

just to get that clear: If you load the images to your cursor you can see the full previews in the cursor and you can go through them by using up and down arrows of your keyboard?

The reason for the behavior you are seeing are some "preferences" either in your document or InDesign wide.

When nothing is selected go to Object > Fit > Frame Fitting Options…

Can you show a screenshot of that?

If something is very odd with the settings there, this could be the reason of the odd behavior you are seeing.

Hm. Or better, load a sample document where you see the issue to Dropbox or a similar service and post the link.

The document could be all empty. Just a single page showing.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender

( ACP )

[DKingDesigner]

Thank you! That was it. I never thought that there might actual be frame fitting option that needed clearing. I inhereted this file from another designer and hadn't really noticed that the behavior was only in that file. I selected "Clear Frame Fitting Options" and that fixed it. Bless you for unraveling what my problem was from my badly worded complaint!