Publisher for Windows — picture frames and cropping

[MikeA]

I place an image on a page in Publisher, then right-click and select Convert to picture frame. Then, if I move the frame's selection handles, the image shifts here and there within the frame and its magnification might change—what happens depends on how I manipulate the selection handles. This seems like normal behavior. But I discovered a different approach by accident:

I place the image onto the page and select Convert to picture frame. Before doing anything else and with either the frame or the image selected, I use the Image control in the context toolbar to resize by some minute amount—say, by as little as .01%. After that, moving the frame's selection handles has an entirely different effect: It crops the image, and the image does not shift position or change magnification while the selection handles are being moved. It's almost as if I'd selected the frame, switched on the obscurely located Lock Children control at the extreme right side of the toolbar, and moved the selection handles only afterward.

I actually prefer it this way — it's faster, enabling cropping without the need for Lock Children or having to use the Vector Crop tool. Is it working as designed, though? I'm not finding anything in the online help about this effect of changing magnification.
 

[Joachim_L]

You can have this effect also by clicking on Properties of the picture frame, setting to None from the top left corner and also without having Lock Children checked. But nice find anyway.

[MikeA]

13 minutes ago, Joachim_L said:

You can have this effect also by clicking on Properties of the picture frame, setting to None from the top left corner and also without having Lock Children checked. But nice find anyway.

Thanks.
I found that doing this (alternately: right-clicking and selecting Frame Properties > None) allowed the frame's handles to be moved without any change in image magnification. But the image continues to shift position within the frame as the handles are moved. That just complicates matters for me. So the resize-image-slightly/move-handles-to-crop is still the approach that gets me what I'm after without too many steps. (If it turns out to be a bug, I hope they don't fix this particular one. : )

[Joachim_L]

@MikeA I would find using the Properties is faster. Selection None AND clicking on the anchor which is bigger. If there is no anchor bigger the image stays in place.

[MickRose]

I would also group the frame and photo so scaling etc. can be done on both.

[MikeA]

8 hours ago, MickRose said:

I would also group the frame and photo so scaling etc. can be done on both.

I seem to be able to scale both frame and image using the outer-most handle (the second handle that appears at the lower-right of the frame). That is, the scaling appears to work as if the two had been grouped, even when I haven't used the Group command explicitly.
But that second outer handle appears only when I 1) convert the image to a picture frame and 2) immediately afterward, re-size the frame or image by some very tiny amount. Strange.

[MikeA]

9 hours ago, Joachim_L said:

@MikeA I would find using the Properties is faster. Selection None AND clicking on the anchor which is bigger. If there is no anchor bigger the image stays in place.

I puzzled over this for a moment. I find the anchor display in the Properties dialog a bit hard to see, but peering at it closely now I understand what you mean. Clicking the larger anchor point toggles it back to the same size as the others, and then it works as I described in the first comment—getting entirely around the workaround of changing the size minutely. Thanks—it produces the desired effect even faster. I don't think I'd ever have discovered that one except entirely at random...