As you’re dragging the Place Gun, InDesign will show you the scaling percentage of the image (as shown on the right).
InDesign will create a frame with the image placed inside it sized proportionally to fill the frame. To get around this shortcoming, click and drag your loaded Place Gun on the page. However, the image will only scale to fit either the width or height of the frame, depending on the orientation of the image being placed. Holding the Shift key down while dragging the loaded Place Gun will allow you to create a frame of any shape, and scale the image inside it. However, unless you’ve already pre-sized the image, you’re likely going to have to do some resizing and cropping. This brings up a dialog box to choose your image, loads the Place Gun, then places the image at 100 percent wherever you click the loaded Place Gun on the page. Of course the basic method for placing an image is to simply hit Command-D, which invokes the Place command from the File menu.
InDesign offers a plethora of options to improve productivity in this area, thanks to keyboard shortcuts. One of the things I love about Adobe InDesign is that there’s usually more than one way to accomplish virtually any task.
