Tip 9 : Aligning and Spacing in Rapidstudio

We often want to create a collage of photo's as a page design. Most of the time we are not totally confident in creating this type of layout in Rapidstudio, as you have to be accurate in your aligning and spacing of pictures. In this tutorial I will be explaining how to create a collage of pictures on a page, as it covers most of the alignment and spacing topics.
I hope this tutorial will help you realise your design intent more accurately and efficiently.

You will probably start with a page layout something similar to this

We are going to start with top row of pictures. The following explanation only refers to the top row, we will be dealing with the rest of the images a bit later.

First of all we need to move the pictures next to each other horizontally to see if they will fit in the "Safe Area" of the page. In this example the pictures are too wide and overlap the safe area horizontally. Please note that you will have to leave a decent amount of space between the safe area and the frames of the images. Otherwise your book might look untidy if there is too little safe space.

We need the top images to have a uniform width, so that they look neat and ultimately fit onto the page. I clicked on the first image(master) and pressed the "CTRL" button and left clicked on the rest of the images to select them all.
You will see that the image I selected first has got blue dots on the edge, indicating this image as the "master" of the selected images. The other two images has got white dots around their edges.
I then "right-clicked" on my page to bring up the menu. I then clicked on "Make same size" and finally I selected "Width". This will resize my selection of images to the same width as the master.

I then needed to make the width of the images on the top row smaller(since they where going over the safe area), so I selected them all again. I then placed my cursor over one of the sides and dragged the side to a new width. This automatically updated the rest of the selection and all the images had the same, smaller width.
Now I placed the images on the utmost left and right hand side within the safe area. These to images will act like "posts" and the rest of the images will refer back to them.
Again I select the top row of images. I then "right-click" on the page, select "Spacing" and finally I select "Make horizontally equal". This will make the spacing equal between the images
I then made sure that ONE of my images are the right distance from the top safe area. I only want to move the image in a vertical position, as my horizontal spacing and position is perfect. I achieve this by selecting the image and press the up/down arrow key. Once I have moved it into the right position vertically, I selected the WHOLE row again, making sure that I select my master image first. I then right-clicked and choose the "Align" option followed by clicking on the "Tops". This aligns all the images in the row to the master's top postion, since you moved into the correct vertical position earlier.

Now that our top horizontal row's spacing and horizontal size is correct we need to start working on our vertical sizes and spacing. We are now only going to deal with the left vertical column, so if I refer to the column, its the left vertical column.
I start by selecting the entire column, making the top image my master. Once they are selected I "right-clicked" and left-clicked on the option "Make same size" and then "Both". This makes the entire column's image sizes identical.

I continued by aligning the left's of the column. At this stage I saw that I had too little vertical spacing. Therefore I selected my column and made the vertical image size smaller. Once I was happy with the size, I got the two image "posts" in the correct vertical height.(Posts refers to the top and bottom pictures that act as an reference when you make the spacing equal) I then made my vertical spacing equal.
The above steps are mentioned briefly, as it is the same process that I followed with the first row. Please refer back to the above steps of the row if you are unsure how to do follow the steps outlined in the previous paragraph.
As we can see in the below screen-shot, the left column and the top row has got the right size and spacing. What I am going to do next is resize the rest of the images on the page.

I then aligned the bottoms of each row to my column that i set up previously.
Once that was completed I aligned the left sides of the images to the top row which was set up previously.
The end result is neatly aligned collage of pictures, ready to be printed!