Creating a Custom Portrait Layout
Pixami allows for a lot of flexibility when it comes to the design of your portrait pages. The following steps will take you through creating a custom layout, saving it, and applying it to new pages.
- Open the Portrait Wizard
2. Adjust the settings in the Portrait Wizard to lay out your portraits in a layout as similar as possible to what you’re aiming to achieve. Be sure that the “Teacher portraits are in the same folder” setting is unchecked. Click OK to flow the portraits.
3. With your portraits flowed, decide what you want your layout to be. Unlocking a portrait will give you the ability to resize and move it to a new location, independently of the rest of the class. Don’t forget to Unlock the portrait name as well, to move it with its corresponding portrait.
To unlock multiple portraits at once, select them at one time by either clicking and dragging your mouse over everything you’d like to unlock or using cmd/ctrl+Click on each portrait/name you’d like to unlock. Once they are all selected, click Unlock from the more tools menu.
4. If you would like to open up some space in your layout, you can “knock out” frames by deleting them. This will NOT delete the student, only the frame. The student will flow to the next frame and the rest of the class will reflow accordingly. The space where their portrait used to be will now be open (be sure you are not kicking anyone off the page by doing so).
5. Add any additional elements such as candid frames or clipart to the page that you wish to apply to to the rest of your pages
6. Save your layout with the Save Layout button in the top toolbar. Select which side of the spread you intend to save. (I don’t recommend saving the background at this time, there are some bugs in the software that keep it from applying correctly).
7. To use your saved layout, first flow another page of portraits, using the Portrait Wizard. What you actually flow will not matter at all, as you are about to apply the styling of your saved layout.
8. Open the Saved Layouts tab, locate your layout, and drag and drop it onto the page you’d like to apply it to.
9. Check to make sure your Saved Layout applied correctly and no students were booted off of the page. Expand the text boxes of any students’ names with warnings to be sure they’re not being cut off.
Note: Teachers will need to be manually dragged and dropped onto the teacher frame in Saved Layouts. They will not automatically flow as they do when using the Portrait Wizard. Specific photos and text will not be applied either, but text boxes and empty photo frames you laid out will be applied for you to fill in.
Tip: For fine tuning, select the smallest Snap size to allow you to have more control over the incremental movement of your elements on the page.
