Photo inserts and plate sections
Open an older biography and the photographs are not spread through the text. They sit in one block in the middle, on glossier paper, with numbered captions and a credits line. That block is a plate section, and it is still the right answer for most books built on photographs — for slightly different reasons than the ones that created it.
Why plates were gathered in the first place
A traditionally printed book is not made of pages. It is made of large sheets, each printed, folded and trimmed into a group of pages called a signature, and the signatures are bound together in order. Color, or coated stock that holds fine detail, could be used for one signature and not the rest. So the photographs went where the special sheet went: one block, in one place, wherever the binding put it.
That is why plate sections land at odd spots — between chapters that have nothing to do with the pictures, or exactly in the middle of the book. Nobody chose those positions editorially. The press did.
Print-on-demand has no signatures
A print-on-demand book is printed a page at a time onto one stock, then bound. There is no separate sheet to reserve for the pictures, and no option to switch to coated paper for sixteen pages. That means the original reason for a plate section is gone.
The modern equivalent survives anyway, because two of its other advantages did not go away. A run of full-page image pages in one place is far easier to lay out than images threaded through running text — no image pushing a paragraph onto the next page, no half-empty pages where a picture would not fit. And it is easier to caption and credit consistently, because every caption sits in the same place on an identical page.
So: keep the block, drop the mythology. Put the images on consecutive full pages at a sensible break — after a part division, between chapters, or at the back before the notes — and number them so the text can refer to them.
When to scatter instead
Gathering is the default, not a rule. Place an image in the text when the reader needs to see it at the moment they read the sentence.
- The picture is the argument. A document you are quoting from, a before-and-after, a map the narrative is following. Sending the reader to page 148 breaks the point you are making.
- There are only a few. Three or four images do not make a section; they make an awkward interruption.
- The images are line art rather than photographs. Diagrams, plans and drawings print well at any size and sit comfortably in a text column.
Scatter and gather can both appear in one book: diagrams inline where they are needed, photographs in a block. What does not work is a handful of photographs dropped in wherever they roughly belong, each one shunting the text and leaving white space behind. Putting images inside a book covers how inline images behave on the page.
Check every image against its printed size
This is the number that decides whether a plate section works, and it is not the number most people look at. A file's pixel count means nothing on its own. What matters is pixels divided by the inches it will occupy on paper.
Aim for 300 pixels per inch at printed size. Below 200 DPI at printed size, treat it as a warning and look at the image closely before you commit. Two worked figures:
- A full-page image on a 6 × 9 page with bleed covers 6.125 × 9.25 inches, because the bleed extends past the trim on the outside edges. At 300 DPI that is 1,838 × 2,775 pixels.
- The same image placed inside the margins at, say, 4.5 × 6.75 inches needs about 1,350 × 2,025 pixels. Printing an image smaller is the cheapest fix available when a file falls short.
Archive scans, family photographs and anything sourced from a web page routinely fail at full page and pass at half. Decide the size first, then check the file against it.
In the Interior Formatter. Inline images, full-page plates, bleed images and two-page spreads are all supported, each one checked against the size it will actually print at, with your alt text carried through to the EPUB. Start a book → · about the Interior Formatter
Captions, credits and permission
A caption belongs on the same page as its image, never stranded on the next one. Keep every caption in one style and one position, and number the plates if the text refers to them — "plate 7" is easier to follow than "the photograph of the harbor".
Credits go with the caption or on a single credits page in the back matter. Pick one and be consistent.
Permission is the part that catches memoirists. A photograph you did not take belongs to whoever took it, in the same way a paragraph you did not write belongs to whoever wrote it — and archives, museums, newspapers and picture libraries each have their own terms for reproducing what they hold. What counts as permitted use, how long rights last, and what an archive may require of you vary by country and by the agreement you sign, so check the source's terms and take advice if the answer is not clear. Quoting other people's work in your book makes the same point about text.
Black and white is a conversion, not a setting
Most print-on-demand interiors print with black ink only, which is why a plate section is affordable at all. But a color photograph printed in black alone loses whatever the color was carrying. Two objects of equal brightness in different hues become the same gray, and a photograph whose subject stood out by color alone stops having a subject.
Convert deliberately and look at the result at printed size, not at screen size. Adjust the contrast on the converted image rather than trusting the automatic result, and if a picture reads as a flat gray field, either crop it to what matters or leave it out. Ordering a proof is the only way to see what your printer's paper does to the midtones — see Order the proof. Then read it in daylight.
If the photographs genuinely need color, price a color interior before you design around it; Color inside the book, and what it costs has the trade.
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Putting images inside a book · More: Quoting other people's work in your book · Color inside the book, and what it costs · Bleed and safe area, explained once