Moving Captions with Pictures

Much better to use a canvas, and arrange your pictures and text the way you want them. Then make the canvas inline.

Excellent! I have searched everywhere for the solution to keeping captions with the images withing wrapped text! Thank you!

Bob Brown, thank you for both of your posts from 20020-07-15. From the way you think and write, I can tell we'd be fast friends.
Your post about accessibility rings painfully true. Now that I must fully comply with Section 508, many of the most valuable Word tips have gone out the window.

An earlier response by Steven J. Van Steenhuyse suggested grouping picture with caption. I couldn't make that work, but since it worked for others, I tried it again. It turns out you can only group a picture when text wrapping is turned on. Who knew? The following process mostly works: 1. Insert picture. 2. Set text wrapping on the picture. 3. Insert caption. 4. Position the caption and group it with the picture. A picture formatted in this way correctly sends its alternative text to PDF.

I wrote "mostly works." The downside is that automatic renumbering of references no apparently longer works with Ctrl-A and F9. Apparently one has to select each caption and press F9.

I am very grateful and I've used this one on a current project. Sadly, when an image is within a table or text box, or even grouped with a text box, the image's alternative text is not used when the Word document is saved as PDF. I am preparing instructional material that must be distributed as PDF and is required to be accessible, so I can't use this tip. My environment is Word 2016 and Windows 10 Pro.

There's nothing wrong with the tip; the problem is an error in Word. It is maddening that Microsoft does not allow a caption to be grouped with its image directly, and doesn't handle output of alternative text correctly, making work-arounds impossible.

Working with images within the text is always a hassle when the text is changing.

My suggestion is to keep text and pictures separate until the final draft. In the text, leave a note, something like "Picture 1".

Have the pictures in the separate file in the correct order.

Before finalizing, insert pictures in the right spot.

select both and then use "group" on the format Ribbon. DONE!

Steve, et al,
I have tried the SHIFT+CLICK and CTL+CLK to active 2 different jpg images--worked fine. Group is grayed out in both Page Layout and Format . I have also made sure the images do not use In Line With Text position.
Thoughts anyone?

I have always used SHIFT-CLICK to select both the picture and the caption, then grouped them using the "Group" tool in the "Arrange" section of the Picture Tools tab. Word then treats them as a single picture object and you can move them together as desired. The text wrapping capabilities of pictures are a lot easier to use than the positioning options for tables, and creating and re-sizing text boxes seems more complicated than simply grouping the objects together.

thank you very useful!!

If all you want to do is copy/paste an image with it's caption use the Snipping Tool. Once inserted, move as desired.

I appreciate this information. This problem has been bugging for a while. What is really frustrating, however, is that this seems to be a regression in Word features. In older versions of Word, if you selected an image and assigned a caption to it - the caption would always move with the image. It seems we are having to do extra work just to achieve the same (obviously wanted) result that Word used to do automatically.

This saved me so much time! Thanks for the tip :)

This seems like something a VBA Macro would be useful for.

Does anyone know of such a macro that would associate existing images and their captions together, placing them into a table or other type of "group"?

On Ken's last point, I'm using a textboxes to float my rather large tables. I also lost automatic numbering on my captions but I've just realised word picks up the numbering again if you maintain the caption numbering of the table within the textbox. Maybe the same idea could work for canvases.

If the image is floating (not an in line picture) then place the caption in a border less textbox and either group the image and textbox or place them both in a canvas. The group or canvas can then be given the desired wrapping style.
The group or canvas can be moved and both the image and caption will stay in the same relationship.
The disadvantage of this method is that automatic numbering of captions does not work.

if you put the picture together in a text but it will not print you see it on screen but it blanks out on paper so this no longer works. any ideas on how to keep the pic and caption together if you are text wrapping? word 2010 will not let you group a pic with a text box

looks like tables it is but it is just not as clean and harder to float

I cannot explain why I did not see or hunt for this tip quite some time ago. The Text Box works quite nicely and can contain both image and caption, if it is sized larger than needed, then adjusted. I will also try the two-cell table option some time. I've only used a picture+text box once, so far, but I have more than a dozen documents in which I had struggled to achieve keeping photo and caption in place. Thanks for the tip.

Hello,

I am using Word 2007 for my PhD thesis. I have 250 pages of text and nearly 50 pages of full page figures.

Suppose full figure page (no text, except caption) is to be on page 5. I would like to know how to format in such a situation so that text from Page 4 continues on to page 6 without displacing the figure from page 5, or changing its page number.

I can't even imagine having to do all this manually. I'm sure there must be a solution. Do help.

I am surprised to see that when I generate a caption as part of a picture (right click, Insert Caption), that even that does not stay with the picture if I change layout options to anything other than Inline. What up?

"If you choose to use a table, then you can use a two-cell table—one for the picture and the other for the caption. It is easy to then wrap the body text around the containing text box or table, and the two will always stay together."

This works only if the two cells are side-by-side: 1 row, 2 columns. If your table is 2 rows, 1 column, the table can break between rows. Some Wordsmiths anchor the image in Row 1, using a "keep with next" style. But that won't work if your company, like mine, places the caption below a picture but above a table. So for tables and figures alike, I make the top row a header row. Yes, I'm saying that the figure lives in a header row.

It sounds as though your pictures are a mixture of in-line pictures and floating (anchored). One (or more) of the pictures is in-line and when you move it is pushing the other pictures out of its way.

Right click on each picture and select Wrap Text then More Layout Options. In the Text Wrapping tab you will see highlighted the current Wrapping style.

What it doesn't tell you is that there are two different types of layout: In-line and all the others.

Make sure that all the pictures are anchored and have Tight wrapping. Then you can drag them without changing others provided that they don't overlap. You can also put text around the pictures but be aware that adding paragraphs above the anchor paragraph will push down the shapes below.

hi help :)
i am using word 2010 - want to put many small images in rows (touching the pic before and after, above and under - i am so mad - i did it perfect for maybe ten rows and now one pic keeps jumping all over or rather makes all the other pics get out of the order i put them in - i read about anchors and dont really get it but the anchor for a lot of pics is one certain pic and when i try to put something next to the anchor pic is when trouble comes - this is making me so mad - i just want the pics to sit where i put them - i did square formatting on all pics and they are all 1.5 inches tall - please help me. There is NO TEXT on the document at all - just images/pics
edie