The Online Content Catalog

The Online Content Catalog is essentially a "cloud" companion to the The Designs Gallery . It contains a huge library of frequently updated content for your program, which includes stock photos and illustrations, design templates, SmartShapes, symbols, photo filters, web widgets and web themes (in Designer Pro and Web Designer) and more.

In v23 and later all content is automatically downloaded to the Designs Gallery, except for the stock photo and illustration library and the Symbols.

The Content Catalog provides an easy and intuitive way to search all of the content, and because the Content Catalog has a larger window than the Designs Gallery, it is usually best for browsing document templates (for this reason File > New from Content Catalog opens the Catalog rather than the Designs Gallery).

To open the Content Catalog

Click "File" > "New from Content Catalog" (Shift+Ctrl+Alt+K)

Click "Insert" > "From Content Catalog" (Shift+Alt+I)

The Online Content Catalog

The catalog is a resizable window - drag the edges or lower right corner to resize. You can enter a keyword to search either all or individual categories, or else browse the content categories on the left. A small pop-up preview appears as you traverse the categories - click to select and that category is expanded and shown on the right side. For categories that have many items there is a page control at the top right, allowing you to flick to the next and previous pages of content.

Import an item to your document either with a double click or by clicking the Import button that appears as you mouse-over the item. After the import, the catalog closes. If you want the catalog to remain open after an import hold down the Shift key as you click.

Note: In Designer Pro X, Web Designer Premium and other product sold or supported by retail partner Magix, the Online Content Catalog is only available if you have an active Update Service.

Note 2: When using the free trial of these Magix versions, items shown in blue in the left content list are free to use during the trial period. All items shown in grey are available instantly for free once you've purchased and unlocked the program.

Stock Photos

One of the categories you will see on the left is Stock Photos. These are provided by an external company called Pixabay and so the first time you import one of these photos you will be asked to read and accept Pixabay's Terms & Conditions. But you only need to do this once on each computer you use, then you can import as many photos as you like. The photos are released under a Creative Commons CC0 license and are totally royalty free. You can use the images for personal or commercial use with almost no limitation.

There are thousands of photos available - just select Stock Photos on the left and then enter keywords in the search field at the top to find them. Alternatively you can replace an existing photo by right-clicking it in your document, and then choosing "Replace photo" > "With Stock Photo" from the context menu.

When you import a stock photo into a print document you get the photo's full resolution into your design. The resolution of photos varies, but most are much higher than HD resolution. When you import into a web document, as when importing local photos, the resolution is still limited to HD because it's rare to need any higher resolution than this for a website.

Stock Illustrations

In addition to the Stock Photos, there is also a category of vector graphic Stock illustrations. All the images have keywords so you can easily search for the graphic you want. Because the original vector files vary enormously in size, graphics larger than around 300px are scaled down. Also un-grouped images are placed in a group for ease of manipulation. Because this is vector clipart, it's re-sizable to any size without loss of quality.