Insert multiple images as quickly as possible in Writer (two images per page, side by side, both images must cover the entire page)

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#1

Hello,
I would appreciate it if you could help me with the following question: I have 62 jpg images in a folder, and I need to insert them into a LibreOffice Writer document that has Letter-sized pages with landscape orientation. The document should meet the following requirements:

  • Two images on each page
  • The images should be placed side by side
  • There should be no separation between the two images on a page
    I would be grateful if you could tell me how to achieve this as quickly as possible, whether it involves using a script (macro) or not. My OS is Debian, my Writer version is 7.5.0.3.
    My ultimate purpose is to convert it to a PDF and then print it.
    Thank you in advance.
1 Like
#2

What is your OS name? LO version? intended save format?
Why have you tagged common since it seems to be a Writer-related question, not Calc, Impress or Draw (all covered by said tag)? Same question for macro: do you request a macro to do the job?

Without much information on the ultimate purpose , here are some possible leads:

  • the document should be oriented landscape, therefore apply page style Landscape to the first page; all others will be automatically the same
  • either configure your page for 2-column without gutter between columns (but you’ll need to manually add column breaks to force next paragraph to next column)
  • or insert a 2-column table in the page with row height manually forced to available page height
    when in last cell, press Tab to create another row (which will appear on next page

Your image will anyway need to be inserted manually where they belong. To automate the process as much as possible, design a user frame style (or customise built-in Graphics) to position correctly the image relative to the anchor (which is most conveniently To paragraph; don’t use To page which does not behave like you think).

But, your job does not look to me as one for Writer which is text flow-oriented (i.e. managing a flow of text in paragraphs across pages. It is closer to a page-oriented job. This is best handled by DTP applications (DTP = desktop publishing). Among the free and libre applications, there is Scribus.

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#3

It is feasible with Impress:
Menu/Insert/Media/Photo album
import all pictures at once.
Then you can copy into Writer slide by slide. I think easier than import one by one.

2 Likes
#4

Newbie here and late to this “party,” but after several months of sporadic use of Writer and pasting of images from file system, I have yet to form a solid conceptual model of how Writer works.
In my case, it will be a somewhat tedious Paste, move focus away from pasted image (causing Anchor icon to disappear), struggle to insert newlines without moving that image, Paste another, …
In spite of reading multiple articles about how this works, my feeble brain is still stuck in MS-Office mode.

#5

There are three common anchors:

  1. To paragraph, this places the anchor at the beginning of the paragraph, the image can be to the side or below the anchor
  2. To character (default), this places the anchor at the chosen point in the paragraph, the image can be to the side or below the anchor
  3. As character, this places the image into the text as a large character. If you press Enter immeditaly after the image, the text will begin a new paragraph below the image

You can choose Wrap > None to have the image without text to the side.

There is a fourth anchor mode which is not readily available because of surprises. It is Anchor to Page, it anchors the frame to the page count. If you anchor the image to the page on the 10th page of a 10 page document and then insert two pages prior to the 10th page, the image will remain anchored to the 10th page and not move to the 12 page as anticipated. If instead you delete 2 pages, the image will not go to page 8 but will enforce two empty pages so it can remain on the 10th page.

My copy of Word 2010 uses anchor as character by default, you can make this default for Writer by clicking Tools > Options > LibreOffice Writer > Formatting Aids and under Image select As Character. OK

There is a way of using Frame styles to specify position but it requires some knowledge,skill and the willpower not to touch it with the mouse.

#6

Try the extension PicTool, it is for multiple changing of images.

#7

if you want to go with macros, a basic starting point for Writer or Draw can be found here :
Créer des cadres pour les images ou les aligner ou faire les deux et plus en même temps - #5 by Otton-Wjatscheslaw

#8

It is worth mentioning that with this approach, if you copy the images in the slides using a Ctrl+C and paste with Ctrl+V into LibreOffice Writer, then it will be pasted as a Drawing Object instead of a regular image.

This will render it incapable of regular image manipulations, such as cropping, compressing, or resizing with a mouse left click while maintaining the picture’s original ratio.

To work around this, instead of pasting the image with Ctrl+V, do

Right mouse button on document -> Paste Special -> More Options... -> Bitmap Image (BMP).
and then the original image-like controls and options will be retained for the pasted image.

Tested on version 25.8.0.4.

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