Affinity Publisher V2 Image Place Tool placing images in picture frames at different sizes when multiple frames selected

[crankybadger]

I have a series of five picture frames that all have the same size and settings. They are all the exact ratio of 8.5x11 to fit the PDF file I am trying to place inside of them. When placing different files in them, they all place perfectly and the PDF looks just as it should. When I place the same pdf in each one individually, the pdf looks just as it should in each frame.

However, when I select all the photo frames and place the same file in each by clicking the image place tool (while all five photo frames are selected), the image on the first frame is correct, but the next four are wrong....looks like they are zoomed in?

The easy solution is to just place the pdf individually, but I'm trying to build a template for many different PDFS, so having to click each photo frame individually is going to be a slog when I have the final version built. I have other files (from a year or two ago) that I can select multiple photo frames and bulk place the same image with one click. Is this a bug? Has something changed? Am I missing some simple setting?

example.afpub

[Dan C]

Hi @crankybadger,

Thanks for your file provided and I'm sorry to hear you're having trouble!

As I understand it, Picture Frames will retain any previous scaling factors set, even when Replacing / Placing a new image or document within the frame.

If you create a new document and draw 5 identical Picture Frames, then select all of these and place an image, it will be placed at the same size within all frames.

However if you then select one frame and change the size of the placed image, or the scaling value on the context toolbar and then repeat the process of selecting all frames and replacing the image - you'll see that that the new image placed is the same size in 4 frames and in the 5th where you manually adjusted the previous image scale, this is retained and therefore the image is at a different size/scale.

I believe that is what you are seeing in your document provided here, and I'd recommend the following to resolve this:

1. Open your attached document
2. Select all Picture Frames
3. From the Context Toolbar, open the Picture Frame Properties dropdown
4. Select Scale to Minimum Fit, you should see all images now match one another between your frames
5. Select Scale to Maximum Fit and you should see the images do not change size, but this setting will then be used when next Placing images into these frames
6. Select Done at the bottom of this dropdown
7. Place your image/document within all 5 frames as required - you should see this is now placed at the same size between all frames.

I hope this helps

[crankybadger]

Thank you, that order of actions does indeed make them all match!

At least after placing the images. If I do that order of actions before placing the images, they still get placed weird- but better than clicking around and adjusting each frame individually.

What's curious to me is that I did create all those frames from scratch, there were no previous images placed in them, and I didn't mess with the scaling at all. So, theoretically they should all import the image at the same size, scale, and location within the frame. But they don't, and I can't figure out why. I've tried it in a new document, tried restarting the program, and the behavior persists.