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You can do a lot to transform the appearance of a placed image in InDesign. You can scale it, crop it, stretch it, rotate it, skew it, and blend it with other page items via the FX panel. But no matter what you do to an image, you can always see what it originally looked like by viewing its thumbnail in the Links panel.
Click the disclosure triangle at the bottom left of the panel to show Link Info.
Then right-click in the Link Info area and choose Show Info Thumbnail.
Now, whenever you select a placed image, you can see what it would look like uncropped, untransformed, etc. right in the Links panel.
Also, if you just want to quickly see the portion of an image that’s hidden by cropping, click on the image with the Direct Selection tool (or double-click with the Selection tool) and hold.
This article was last modified on July 25, 2019
This article was first published on January 13, 2015
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Customizing your view settings for the Links panel is very useful. In some jobs you just want the basic info so it takes less room, and on others you want a wider panel showing options like color space, effective resolution, scaling %, perhaps the previews as mentioned above . . . so I save a new workspace with the various Links options. That way you can have one called “Preflight Links” or “Design Links” or whatever you want and switch between them by just switching to the other workspace.