Scott Dawkins

This solution looks complex but will take just a few minutes. If you’re creating your inventory with MS Word you don’t have to buy additional software to add photos. I created the start of a table with one row and the amount of columns I wanted (for me it’s two as I use portrait for A4 with 6 photos per page). When you’ve created this, right click in the first box of the table and select table properties. Click on the ‘row’ tab and set it to the height you want (7.3cm will give you 3 rows on A4 – play around with it until it gives you what you want). Make sure the box for ‘Allow row to break across pages’ is un-checked. Then click on the ‘column’ tab and type in the width (8.4cm for me). Then click on the ‘cell’ tab and enter 8.4cm again and select how you want the photo to be placed in the box (ie centre). Click ok and you’re set. You’ll have a small table of two columns and one row. Before you enter your photos use the tab key to tab across the fields to create a larger table with as many boxes as the photos you’ll enter. What should now happen is that when you place your photos in the boxes they will be limited to the size of the table as you’ve fixed the height and width. I chose the height so I can enter large portrait photos as not all photos can be landlscape and if the height was set to less these photos would be very small.
Someone above mentioned a problem with a large file size of the finished Word doc once it’s got all the large file size photos. If you’re saving as a pdf the size may come down okay for email but if it’s still a bit large, try one of the following. This is what I’ve done when using Word 2010: When you’ve finished adding all your photos to your Word doc click a picture once and look at the ‘Picture Tools’ tab in the Word header. On the left of this there is a little icon next to ‘Corrections’. This is the ‘compress pictures’ function. Click and select the quality that’s good for your purpose (150ppi still gives clear results with small picture size but experiment). You get the choice to apply this to one photo at a time or ALL your photos in that document. This will reduce the file size of the whole document – dependent upon ppi selected. If you want to reduce it further there a few websites which reduce pdfs etc. upload your file and you get a reduced one back. Make sure you choose a safe one! Most impressive with large files (I had to reduce a file with a load of scanned pages from a 21MB and this came back as 6MB).