April 2009

The Preview palette in the Tools Window has a few great uses. You’ll know you can view your whole album, layout by layout, in order. But did you know you can also re-order the layouts?

Just drag the layout you want to move and drop it in the position you’d like it to sit within the album sequence. The rest of the layouts will re-arrange themselves automatically to accommodate the newly positioned layout.

Finally, if you’re editing with your clients (and you’ve got two screens) you might like to drag the Preview pane out of the Tools window and resize it to fill the second screen. Then you can work on the first screen while your clients follow along on the second.

Cheers, Nigel

When you’ve invested time creating a layout with a number of images on it, and aligned it carefully, you won’t want to mess it up. Which is when the Group/Ungroup function comes in handy.

Grouping images keeps them in position relative to each other so you can move them around and align them as if they were a single aperture.

Just select the images you’d like grouped and click on the Group/Ungroup Apertures icon in the Layout pane of the Tools window. To Ungroup them, just click the icon again.

Once you’ve grouped apertures here’s what happens:

• When you click on a grouped aperture to select it, a blue line appears around the entire group.
• The relevant tools in the Layout pane of the Tools window (eg the alignment and spacing buttons) operate on the entire group.

The tools on the Image pane of the Tools window don’t work on grouped apertures. You’ll need to ungroup to use them (if you don’t want to risk messing up your layout you can lock the individual apertures instead).

Groups and templates

When you drag templates on to a Layout that’s a different size to the template, Remix automatically groups the apertures so you can resize the template to fit the new format. Once you’ve done that you’ll want to ungroup so you can use the Images pane to crop, frame etc.

HTH, Nigel

I feel a bit geeky. I uncovered an undocumented PJ Remix hack (read carefully):

To display the image/aperture data, hold down the Alt/Opt key while you mouse over an image on your layout. Here’s what you see:

Ok, not complicated, not really secret, not a hack… but definitely useful.

Cheers, Nigel