Below are some tips and tricks for managing your photos within your Picaboo Project.

The Media Tray

All of the images that have been imported into your project can be found near the bottom of the project editor, we call this the Media Tray. Within the media tray, you can drag your images on to your pages.

Note: that photos already used in your project are marked with a check mark in the lower right corner.

Photo Preview

You can preview photos from the Media Tray simply by clicking on them. A larger, high resolution image will appear in front of your workspace. Simply click on it again to have it return to the Media Tray.

Add Photos and Hide Used Photos

When looking for a particular photo or page, if your list is too long to see all of them on the screen, you can use the slider below the images/pages to scroll through them. There are also two arrow buttons on the sides of the Tray, that when clicked will scroll to the next section on the Media Tray.

If you want to reduce the number of images in the media tray to only those you have yet to use, you can click on the Hide used photos option box, to the left of the Media Tray.

You can also, expand the media tray to become larger. Click on the "Manage Photos Button" in the media tray

This will expand the media tray so you can see multiple lines of images in one view.

The Add Photos button is what you'll want to click on to pull more images into your project. After clicking on the button, you can import images using the same process that you used when starting the project by navigating to where your images are stored, selecting the ones you want, and clicking the Add to Book button.

Note: that images already in your project are not selectable this time around.

Above the "Add Photos" button, you will see an option to "Manage Photos" which will give you the option to select how the images are sorted in the Media Tray. You can sort by Date taken or by the image's Filename. You can also select the option to "Auto-Layout Photos" which will auto-fill your book with the images you have in the Media Tray. This will replace all the images on all the pages so if you have work you don't want to lose which is already saved in your book, you would not want to use this function.

In this window you will also have the option to delete photos from the project by clicking the red "x" at the bottom corner of that photo. If you click the green check box, the editor will jump to the page that uses that photo.

Page Manager

Aside from a storage space for all of the images, backgrounds, or embellishments that you choose, the Media Tray also contains the Page Manager feature. By clicking on the Pages tab on the lower left, you'll see all of your current pages in the tray. This is a great way to jump to a particular page, or even rearrange the pages on the fly. Here you can also use the arrows or the scroll bar to move through the pages.

If you want to look at more pages than what is shown here, you can click on the "Manage Pages" option. This will open up a window that allows you to see more pages at a glance. You can also click the plus signs "+" to add pages or the red "x" to delete pages or spreads.

You are able to move pages in this view as well, just drag and drop the pages to the desired placement.

Spreads vs Single Pages

In our lay-flat books, a spread refers to two connected pages that allow you to place content anywhere on the combined page without any restrictions. This feature is particularly useful as it enables you to showcase content that spans across the both pages.

When you are in the Picaboo editor, you will always have two active pages which you can edit at any one time, as if the book was laying open in front of you.

You can set whether those two pages are treated as two single pages or as a unit, a single "spread."

The place to set this is located under Layouts.

If your pages are set as a "Spread," you can apply a background or photo so that it spreads across both pages.

If your pages are set as "Pages," backgrounds will apply to the two pages separately.

When viewing your pages under the Manage Pages option, you can add pages "+" or delete pages "x" or move pages around, however, whether you can add/delete/move pages will depend on what comes after this spot in the book. If you have spreads later in your book, you will not be able to add, delete or move a single page since this will break up the later spreads.

If you want to add or delete a single page that has spreads after it, that page would have to be moved to the end of the book where there are no spreads, or all the pages after the one you want to change would need to be switched to "Pages."

Related Articles:

Organize Photos

Adding, Removing and Moving Pages

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