Any easy way to automate a layout?

[neverzen]

Need to layout 800 portraits all together to make a banner, they are all the same size and resolution. Is there a way to automate the creation of the picture boxes and fill them with the images, if i rename all the images in seqential order? I dont have the specific measurements , but is the automation possible? Or does anyone know of anything else that I could do to avoid laying it out and placing the portraits by hand? Im using InDesign CS.

thanks.

[GuyB]

Could be possible with a script. But I'm not a scripter ! You could browse the Adobe Studio Exchange site and look if there is a script already available there. Or you could try the Adobe forum on scripting and ask the question there.

[DCurry]

If you had CS2, you could use the Bridge application to create an InDesign contact sheet. It looks like it could do what you need.

If you don't find anything and wind up doing it "manually", draw one box and then step and repeat it to fill the page. Instead of using the "Place" command, set up your monitor so you can see your layout as well as the finder. Simply drag each photo from the finder and drop it into the appropriate picture frame in ID. Much faster than Placing and navigating menus.

[Len Zigante]

I think what you might be looking for is a plugin called Incatalog from Em Software. It will allow you to pull in all text & images indicated in a database into a predefined group of text/image boxes which you can just duplicate & align throughout your layout, changing the reference codes as you go. You can probably place the reference codes by creating autoflow text boxes & flowing the data in from an excel file but I cant guarantee that will work as I have yet to try it.

Hope this proves to be useful & good luck with your challenge.

Len :D