Slide Master > Image Placeholder

Hi Wesley,

I tested this out on my own files, and was able to replicate the behavior you're describing when adding an image to the placeholder it moves that image to the front. The only workaround is to right click on it and send it to the back, or click on the image within the timeline and drag it to the bottom of the list. I've reported this to our QA team, but I don't have a time frame to offer on a fix, so in the meantime I'd use the workaround. 

Hey Ashley,

Thanks for getting back to me on this. I am glad its not just me finding this problem but the solution you suggested will not work in this scenario due to the placeholder image only moving to the back of our timeline based layers. The image will still appear above any components created in the slide master, this isn't ideal as I would like the full screen image to be set as my background and the animations created in the slide master to appear on top.

I did however find a solution which is to create a slide master with the placeholder image, this is all that is needed. Then create a feedback master with all the animations in and the placeholder text. Then when creating your slide, choose the slide master with your placeholder image in and then proceed to create a new layer using the feedback master. After you have done this simply change the setting to not hide all layers and tell the layer to show when the timeline starts.

Sorry if I am going on a bit, but this was the only solution I had in the timeframe.

Hi Wesley,

Thanks for sharing a bit more information, and I'm curious if you could share your .story file with me? On the example .story file I shared with our QA team, I was only adding new elements on the slide itself, and then when going to add an image to the placeholder it brought it to the front. When I added additional elements to the slide master, the placeholder stayed at the back - so it seems we've got two different things here. 

If you'd like the image to appear full screen as your background image were you unable to set it using the Background design set up?  You can choose if it's applied to all slides or just one slide. 

The way the image placeholders work really limits their usefulness. Like Wesley, I have a design that contains multiple elements on the master slide. Behind all of these elements I would like to have a background image that is customizable  at the page level so I added an image placeholder. However when I exit the slide master set up and go to my page. the placeholder has now moved to the top of the stack of all those elements. Lame! 

It seems my only other options are to create a full screen background image and assign that to the background of the slide or create a transparent png with "holes" cut out to show the elements that are being covered. Neither solution is very elegant. 

As horrible as Adobe Captivate is, at least it gives you the option to choose whether master slide items appear in front of or behind content slide items.

Hi Randall,

Sorry you didn't find the assistance you needed in this thread and thanks for sharing some additional thoughts here. If you'd like to see a different behavior in the future you may also want to share your thoughts in the form of a feature request as those will go directly to our product development team for review.