Putting pictures in Canvas

[DianneHarris]

I have problems with pictures not being in place when I copy and put them in Canvas.  If I have it where I wrap around the text, I cannot redo it and put it in place.

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi @DianneHarris ...

I'm not exactly sure what you are asking.  When you say you "copy and put them in Canvas"...what do you mean?  Are you copying pictures from one course to another?  If so, that may not work...as the image would be stored in the original course and not the course you might be pasting the image into.  So, the image might be broken in that way.

If you are wanting to wrap text around an image, there are ways to do that with HTML code and/or using the align tools here in the RCE (Rich Content Editor).

Again, I'm not sure if I'm understanding your question correctly or not.  If you could provide some more information (screen shots, short video, etc.), that would be great...thanks!

[DianneHarris]

I write my assignments out in Word 11 and sometimes use pictures.  When I copy and put it into Canvas, the picture will not show.  I then inserted the photo into Canvas but could not get the text to flow around the image as I had in Word 11 before I copied it.

[Chris_Hofer · Accepted solution]

Good morning, @DianneHarris ...

Thank you for coming back to this topic to provide some more details.

While I understand that using Word to design your content might work for you, Word is notorious for adding a bunch of rogue/junk HTML code to your Canvas course pages when you copy/paste it into Canvas.  And, sometimes when I've done this myself, it creates more headaches than I care to have.  Then I have to spend time looking at the code to clean it up or use a website that cleans up the HTML for me.  (Even then, when using a HTML clean-up site, it's still a good idea to ensure your pages look the way you want.)   So, this is not a practice I would typically recommend for folks that are building content.

If you are copy/pasting both text and images from Word into Canvas, the formatting might not display the way you had intended, and the images might not display as you had hoped.  This is why I always find that first uploading the images I'll be using to the "Files" area of my course is a good idea.  How do I upload a file to a course?  Then, as I am building my content pages, I can just select those images I've already uploaded to "Files" to use on my pages.  How do I embed images from Canvas into the Rich Content Editor as an instructor?

Instead, what I might recommend is using a sandbox course in your Canvas account.  This would be a separate blank course that you'd have access to (talk to your school's Canvas administrator if you don't have something like this already), and then you could build your content in that course to copy into your "live" course when you are ready.  There are a couple different ways you can copy the content from your sandbox course to your "live" course:

• Using the Course Import Tool, if you want to only choose specific pages to import/copy from one course to another, you can use this Guide: How do I select specific content as part of a course import?.  Just be sure that you are logged into your "live" course as you follow these steps...as you'll be selecting your sandbox course (where the content exists) to import into your "live" course.  Using this method, you can import/copy multiple items at a time.
• If you want to copy just one item at a time, then you can use Guides like the following (you would want to be logged into your sandbox course for these Guides because you'd be copying content to the "live" course):
  • How do I copy a page to another course?
  • How do I copy a discussion to another course?
  • How do I copy a quiz to another course?
  • How do I copy a quiz to another course in New Quizzes?
  • How do I copy an assignment to another course?
  • How do I copy a module to another course?
  • How do I copy a module item to another course?

Finally, here is a short video I found on YouTube that shows how to align images that you want to add to content pages in your course:

I hope all this information will be helpful to you!  Sing out if you have more questions...thanks!