Jens Koopmann

Sorry for my late response, but have a look at the attached screenshot from PagePlus. It shows a panel in which you can import all files that you would like to use in your publication. If you have done that, they are always at your disposal, when you work with your document. Do if you draw a picture frame, you can then go to your imported files and just drag and drop the picture into the frame. As a result, this picture will get a little marker with a "1" showing, that it is already used in this publication (as shown in the screenshot). All pictures will remain in that kind of browser, whenever you open that specific document you imported them for. This is very handy and time saving if you have publications with many pictures. Unfortunately Publisher has no such feature and therefore makes handling of images much more complicated.

I was really looking forward to Publisher as a future proof replacement auf Page Plus X9 and was very excited when the first beta came out. Unfortunately I have to conclude for myself, that Publisher makes creating my documents much more complicated than Page Plus, which is why I won't jump on the train - at least for now. But let me explain why... Page Plus has been my DTP software in the past few years whenever I needed to layout photobooks, which also contained text. So my publications are very image centric. I love Page Plus, because I can preload all my images into the Source File Pane where they are always at my hand, whenever I want to insert one into the publication or whenever I want to exchange an exitisting picture. Also I can always see which images I already used and which ones are still available. It behaves a bit like photobook-software provided by Photobook-Companies in regard to image handling, but it also provides all advantages of a fully featured DTP-Solution. Unfortunately Publisher is no way near that for my purposes. The fact that I cannot place Images in a workspace without placing them immediatly into the document simply is not very comfortable. Also exchanging photos is not as intuitive. At last I can never see which images I already used, which is kind of bad if your looking at publications with 100-200 pages full of images. So for now I will (have to) stick with Page Plus, but I hope Publisher will become a full replacement in the future.

Just check version .133. The place image tab remains visible with all not placed images if I change the tool.

Hi Walt, you are right, the right popped up the context menu. The left click simply did nothing. If the behaviour in .133 is like you described, that means, that publisher is not very much suited for image focused publications unllike page plus which is very good in that regard. I was hoping to replace Page Plus with Publisher, but therefore handling of images has to be improved.

Totally agree. This behaviour at the moment is really counter intuitive!

Thats a must feature for me as well. Its the reason I like Page Plus and I am hoping that Affinity Publisher will get it too!

I find that quite complicated too. If at least pictures could be directly imported as assets, that would help a lot. Hope that will be changed until the final version.

Hi Chris, thanks for your reply. Unfortunately the procedure you described is not working. I have the pictures in the place picture tab and a frame on the page. I left click on the picture (it gets selected) then i left click on the frame and it opens the frame context menu, but it does not insert the picture. Just to make it clear, it works immediately after I opened alle images. Then I can click on any frame to insert the picture. But after I change the tool to something else, the images remain in the Place Images Tab and there is no obvious way to get them out of there. Hope you have another idea Thanks!

In Page Plus I could get all my photos into the document and then drag and drop them into picture frames. I tried the same here. Clicked on the place image tool and selected multiple pictures. These appeared then under "Place Images". So far so good. Then I drawed my picture frames and tried to drag the pictures into them afterwards. But there is no way to move the pictures from the "Place Images" tab anywhere. I cant even get them out of that tab anymore. What I can do is go to the Image Tool and select all pictures and then IMMEDIATLY place them into existing frames. But this also removes them from the place picture tab, so if I want to swap pictures in frames afterwards I can't do that. Thats a lot worse than Page Plus and I hope the functionality of placing pictures will be much improved.