Ted Padova's Blog

You may have a need to use a button field on a form for adding an image to the PDF file —something like an employee ID form or an application that requires a photo to be submitted with the form.

You can easily add a button field in Acrobat and click the field to import an image onto your form. But if you try to import an image on a form created in Acrobat Pro using Adobe Reader, the button just sits there and won't prompt you with a Broswe dialog box that enables you to import a photo on the form.

With just a simple solution in Adobe LiveCycle Designer you can easily create an Image Field that is recognized by Adobe Reader and allows the Reader user to import an image on a button click.

You can either create a form in LiveCycle Designer or open a form in LiveCycle Deisgner that you created in Acrobat. In Figure 1, I opened a form that was created in Acrobat. All the form fields are recognized by Designer and all I need to do is to add one more field to my deisgn.

To add the field to your form open the Library panel and choose the Image Field object. Be certain to use Image Field and not Image and drag the field to your form as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1

That's it. Just save the file as either a static or dynamic PDF document (any version) and now the Adobe Reader user can import an image with the click on the Image Field (see Figure 2).

Figure 2

The file does not need to be enabled with Reader extensions for this to work. But if you want the Reader user to save the data after filling in the form, choose Advanced > Enable Usage Rights in Adobe Reader from within Acrobat Pro.

Download the PDF file ( File Size: 88K)

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