By Justin Doughty
At some point you may be asked to insert a raster image into an AutoCAD drawing, a good example of this is inserting a company logo on an AutoCAD title sheet.
There are usually several common questions around this, so I thought I would write a quick guide to the different ways of inserting and using images in all versions of AutoCAD.
The First method to attach an Image into AutoCAD is to use “Attach” and select your image:
This attachment will remain as a link inside of your drawing, linking to the image in its folder location. This lets you update the image, without having to update the drawing. However when you send the drawing, you will also have to send the image file. Another benefit is that you can set background transparency to the attached image.
The second method is to use OLE (Object Linking and Embedding). Usually this is done when you copy and paste an image from outside of AutoCAD, using the normal CTRL+C/CTRL+V Windows commands:
This will embed the image into the drawing file, so if the drawing is sent the image will be included. But if the image is changed, it will have to be changed in every drawing. Also you cannot set the transparency of an OLE image.
Finally from both of these methods you may notice the images enter AutoCAD with a black line border.
To remove this use the relevant system variable command:
IMAGEFRAME or OLEFRAME, and set to 0
This gives you the final result:
Comments
3 comments
Thanks for the clear and helpful instructions! Is it normal behaviour that when setting OLEFRAME to 0, the image can no longer be selected? I'm still on ACAD LT 2011 and found that I had to set OLEFRAME back to 1 in order to be able to move around the image again.
Hi Mathias,
Yes this is correct, normal behaviour in AutoCAD. When setting OLEFRAME to 0 we are effectively turning off the frame, and therefore the only part we can select.
I'm trying to automate some processes in AutoCad. Each drawing (land survey) has a jpg of the house on the sheet (PSPACE). The image size and aspect ratio change depending on who took the picture in the field. Is there a way to automate this procedure, rather than attach image, pick insertion point, scale +/-, then move to "best" looking location?
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