Picture files names table of content -- how to?

[2fish]

Hello everybody!

I'm new to this forum as well as the Affinity Publisher.

I'm working on an art book, which is going to have about 80 pictures (art). I would like to create a Table Of Content (TOC) with titles of the pictures. The file names are titles. Is there any way to create TOC of picture-titles/file-names automatically in Affinity Publisher? If this topic/tutorial was already discussed on this forum, please point me to the right direction. I will greatly appreciate your help. Thank you!

[Komatös]

Hi @2fish and welcome to the forums.

You can create as many TOCs as you need, you just have to create a separate paragraph format for each TOC.

[Hangman]

Hi @2fish and another welcome to the forums,

If you download and take a look at the Publisher manual @MikeTO has created he goes into great detail about how to create a TOC on Pages 158 - 171.

Here is a link where you can download the manual in PDF format, hopefully, this will be a good introduction. If the titles physically appear in the text itself and have their own text style then you will be able to use these to create a TOC. As far as I'm aware filenames on their own won't be sufficient if they don't form part of the text.

[2fish]

28 minutes ago, Hangman said:

Hi @2fish and another welcome to the forums,

If you download and take a look at the Publisher manual @MikeTO has created he goes into great detail about how to create a TOC on Pages 158 - 171.

Here is a link where you can download the manual in PDF format, hopefully, this will be a good introduction. If the titles physically appear in the text itself and have their own text style then you will be able to use these to create a TOC. As far as I'm aware filenames on their own won't be sufficient if they don't form part of the text.

Thank you Hangman for your help!
I have familiarized myself with the principal of creating TOC. My Idea is to have just pictures without any text/titles, but can be found by page numbers in TOC. Maybe, as you're suggesting, "the titles physically appear in the text itself and have their own text style" but be "hidden"? This way the pages have minimalistic look but function as intended. 

[lacerto]

Obsolete.

[MikeTO]

Here's a very easy way to make a TOC of images. I recommend using linked images instead of embedded to keep your file size low.

1. For each of the 80 images:
   1. Copy the image to the clipboard
   2. Draw a text frame to accompany the image - make it larger than the image, at least temporarily
   3. Choose Heading 1 (or whatever heading style you want)
   4. Paste the copied image into the frame and scale it to the size you want it to appear in the TOC - if you don't scale it, the TOC will include it at full size
   5. Optional: Enter text to the left or right of the image
   6. Hide this text frame with Layer > Hide or by clicking the layer visibility toggle in the Layers panel
2. Insert the TOC

If there's more than one image on a page of the book then of course you need only draw one frame per page.

I'm going to add this idea to my manual, it's kind of cool that you can do this.

[walt.farrell]

35 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

I'm going to add this idea to my manual, it's kind of cool that you can do this.

That is not working for me, Mike. (Only tested on Windows, and on .2212 so far.)

[MikeTO]

56 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

That is not working for me, Mike. (Only tested on Windows, and on .2212 so far.)

If the image isn't showing up in the TOC then you might have accidentally hidden the image layer instead of the text frame layer. Or you might have turned off "Include inline pins" in the TOC panel.

Here's a messy example. The images are embedded to make it easier to share but it's a tiny doc.

test.afpub

Edited January 4, 2024 by MikeTO
Added more detail

[MikeTO]

I made a catalogue-y example for my manual to demonstrate this. 

[2fish]

7 hours ago, lacerto said:

If the amount of images is remarkable and the project is well planned, one option would be to use Publisher Data Merge to fetch the images and image file names from an Excel sheet. The field that picks the filename could then have a paragraph style with invisible fill color and the text field receiving the filename would be grouped with the picture frame so that it can be easily moved together with the image. 

Then, when you do the layout, you would copy the images from the generated merged image publication and position and size the images in the actual layout, and then create a separate TOC for the images. The following screenshot shows just the merged file where each image is on a separate page:

If you have lots of images, you could use the Merge Data Layout tool and merge e.g. 100 images per page and then copy paste the generated image packages (above the filename and image itself wrapped in a picture frame control and grouped in MyImage groups) into the publication layout. 

On Windows you can use Windows Explorer to copy filenames onto Clipboard (Ctrl + Shift + C, or Copy as path from the context menu) and then place in Excel sheet:

You could of course use the same method to include whatever image data, as Windows is capable of showing lots of file related (e.g. EXIF) data as extra columns in context of filenames listed in Details view of Windows Explorer. [You would need e.g. the free PowerToys Text Extractor to grab text on screen in table format); for professional projects, I would recommend e.g. xplorer2]. When using an Excel sheet, you could also easily include image captions to be used in context of images. 

The following shows how captions could be added as Comments in Windows Explorer and then copy pasted into Excel sheet:

You might be able to do something similar also on macOS.

Thanks a lot for your help! I have macOS, so will see what I can do with it. But it looks like exactly what I want. I'll work with it and report back. 

2 hours ago, MikeTO said:

Here's a very easy way to make a TOC of images. I recommend using linked images instead of embedded to keep your file size low.

1. For each of the 80 images:
   1. Copy the image to the clipboard
   2. Draw a text frame to accompany the image - make it larger than the image, at least temporarily
   3. Choose Heading 1 (or whatever heading style you want)
   4. Paste the copied image into the frame and scale it to the size you want it to appear in the TOC - if you don't scale it, the TOC will include it at full size
   5. Optional: Enter text to the left or right of the image
   6. Hide this text frame with Layer > Hide or by clicking the layer visibility toggle in the Layers panel
2. Insert the TOC

If there's more than one image on a page of the book then of course you need only draw one frame per page.

I'm going to add this idea to my manual, it's kind of cool that you can do this.

Thank you very much, that looks great! I'll work with it and see what I can accomplish, due to my little experience working with Affinity P. I'll report back. 

[MikeTO]

This was a really fun example to add to the manual - it's cool that we can include images in a TOC so easily.

For the manual I also reversed the images and page numbers in the example using the option to do so in the TOC panel which provided a real-world example of when you might want to reverse the page numbers.

I wouldn't use this pictorial index approach myself, unless Serif adds the ability to alpha sort TOCs, a feature that is occasionally requested. ID has this feature and I think it would be useful for pictorial TOCs because there's no way to include a pinned image in an index. But if we could alpha sort a TOC, I could use this for something like a sculpture index. I'd have to include some text with the images to use alpha sorting but I'd need that for an index anyway.

So + 1 for alpha sorting of TOCs - I could easily add sculpture and symbol "indexes" to my history book using the TOC feature.

[lacerto]

Obsolete.

[thomaso]

@lacerto, it seems you did not need the folder path but the full image paths only. You can copy them directly from a bunch of selected files in the Finder  via right-click + option key:

[2fish]

9 hours ago, MikeTO said:

This was a really fun example to add to the manual - it's cool that we can include images in a TOC so easily.

For the manual I also reversed the images and page numbers in the example using the option to do so in the TOC panel which provided a real-world example of when you might want to reverse the page numbers.

I wouldn't use this pictorial index approach myself, unless Serif adds the ability to alpha sort TOCs, a feature that is occasionally requested. ID has this feature and I think it would be useful for pictorial TOCs because there's no way to include a pinned image in an index. But if we could alpha sort a TOC, I could use this for something like a sculpture index. I'd have to include some text with the images to use alpha sorting but I'd need that for an index anyway.

So + 1 for alpha sorting of TOCs - I could easily add sculpture and symbol "indexes" to my history book using the TOC feature.

 

5 hours ago, lacerto said:

Basically it seems to be supported similarly on macOS (though it probably is not possible to add data columns in the file system itself, similarly as on Windows). If you do not have Excel, you can use Numbers.

Here's a video demo on how you could do it (Full Path could be used if the image files are not in the same folder as the Publisher file where the TOC is to be created):

 

After having copy pasted each image group into the actual layout, you can create a TOC that uses ImageName paragraph style to fetch TOC page numbers for image locations in the publication.

You could easily use the same method to additionally autocreate e.g. square or ellipsoid miniature images to be used in context of TOC.

 

2 hours ago, thomaso said:

@lacerto, it seems you did not need the folder path but the full image paths only. You can copy them directly from a bunch of selected files in the Finder  via right-click + option key:

Thanks a lot for your help! I'm new to this app, so it will take me a some time to process it all and learn how to use it. 😀👍👍👍

[lacerto]

Obsolete.

[2fish]

Reporting back. Dealing with database looks too complicated for me at this point. I'll keep working on it, but for now this is what I did: 

1. Created a master page with one picture frame per page. 
2. Added pages and applied master page to them.
3. Automatically populated picture frames with pictures.
4. Created frame texts per image on a master page and assigned style Heading 2 to them.
5. This is the most teddies: clicking on an image, I exposed a file name. I highlighted and copied a file name, and pasted it to its frame text. I repeated it with every image...
6. Created TOC with Heading 2. All image names/file names appeared in TOC.
7. In the master page, I made Frame texts invisible.

It would be great if Affinity comes up with a solution for creating frame texts from corresponding image names automatically. 

 

Edited January 5, 2024 by 2fish

[lacerto]

Obsolete.