photo won't drag to character sketch

Hi,
sorry for this very basic question, but I can’t get my photo to open in the char. sketch window or in the editor.

Right now I have them in the binder, but not sure if they are technically considered “image files” altho I can certainly see the image when I click on them. However, when I try to drag them to either the editor area or the char. window (where it says “drag an image file”) they get rejected. (I also tried dragging them straight from the finder w/o success).

What am I doing wrong??
thanks!!!

If you really are on Windows, it would be a good idea to post in the Windows forum, not the Mac one. People might get confused and give you answers that relate to the Mac version (there are still lots of differences between them).

Martin.

I really am on a Mac. But it’s my first one and I’ve only had it for a few weeks so the word “window” still occasionally slips out of my keyboard. My bad.

I was trying to do that as well, but was stymied.

[url]https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/t/synopsis-image-files/18670/1]

That “Drag in an image file” area seems to only work in a couple of the ways that a user would attempt to drag in an image file.

I find it mostly counter-intuitive, but there are workarounds.

Actually I think the comment was more aimed at the fact that your platform tag in your forum profile says “Windows”. :slight_smile: We use the word “window” to describe the float box things on your screen, as well as various interface elements—though you might come across the term “pane” a bit more often, as panes are more often smaller pieces of glass within the larger window.

booktalk-
thanks, but shouldn’t my problem be more simple than your five step solution since I’ve already got the photos in the binder? Seems like other people (at the link) were saying you can drag them from the binder, no…? Also, they weren’t ever embedded in text. I keep thinking surely there is a simple solution to this - I mean, the pix are in files in the binder and I can view them when I open the files.

The only thing I can think of is if they are in the wrong format somehow, but I don’t know how to check nor change that.

thanks for any help here…

Amber-
thanks for the heads up. Did you notice my platform now says Mac? :smiley: (when I first started using Scrivener I was on a pc and didn’t think about changing it)

What format are your images? You should be able to work either of these methods, but if you have a more obscure image format it might be getting rejected. (For example, I can import a .skitch or .pxm file and view the image in the editor, but they are not fully supported file types and won’t be accepted for synopsis images.) Make sure you’re dragging to the synopsis area in the inspector on the right, not on the corkboard.

If your image is imported into the binder it should have a little image icon.
bindericons_imagetext-2.png
If it’s a document text icon, then the image has just been inserted into the text and isn’t a standalone item in the binder. You can grab it from the editor and drag it into the binder (anywhere outside of the Draft folder) to copy it out as an image.

Thank you MM.
Your explanation helped me figure out that it was indeed a formatting issue - I hadn’t saved the file as a jpg. Silly me.

I certainly never wanted more steps to drag-and-drop an image from the main pane to the synopsis pane. That’s why I asked about it in the first place.

But as said here…

…we have to make any image a standalone item in the binder before doing anything else with it.

If there were a slightly more direct way I would be happier, but I’m not expecting it anytime soon.

On reflection, if the synopsis field stated, more specifically

“Drag in an image file from the binder.”

instead of

“Drag in an image file.”

…then it all would have been clearer and people wouldn’t attempt dragging in unsupported ways and failing.

It wouldn’t be accurate, though, since you can also just drag a file from the Finder. Perhaps the key part is “file”–if an image is inserted into a text document, it is embedded into the text file and is not its own (image) file.

WriterPants, glad you’ve got it working now!

“Drag in an image file” isn’t any more correct if it only works in set circumstances.

Oh I know it’s a quibble, but it wasted my time nonetheless. It only stood out because so much of the program is seamless.

It’s like being confronted with a “Press any key to continue” prompt, then finding out that only the return and escape keys work. It works, but it doesn’t help anything, in a user-interface sense, to then say that “return” and “escape” are keys and leave it at that.

It’s a super program otherwise. Again, I’m not expecting any change here, but I’m sure I’m not the only person who has dragged in an image file in good faith and had nothing happen.