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I have an artboard with a card design and I have an image that have to change one hundred times inside that. It´s an image that changes the meaning of the card, but it will always have the same width and height. Those images are a JPG file, that I will place on that card design AI file.
Is there any solution without using one hundred different layers? Like an action?
Thank you!
Not in Illustrator, but InDesign would let you do this pretty easily. Any repeating elements could be added to a Master. You could even use dynamic data to import those images if you have them in a list somewhere.
I think I get what you're saying now. You have a design with one image position that will be changed out with 100 different images. Right?
In that case you have two roads:
Use the Variables feature Horatio mentioned.
You could also set up a javascript that will read the directory of images and loop through each found image performing the following tasks.
You would get into trouble if your images aren't all the same size. It would relink them at the same size, doing whatever squishing and stretching was necessary.
A more manual alternative is ...
Set up your template design and follow these guidelines for data merge. You'll just have to tag the image element in your layout and put the path to your images into a spreadsheet so data merge can do it's thing.
Make the card in flash as a 100 frame animation and export the individual frames as your 'artbaords'.
Im not sure if thats applicable to you design but if it is just tiny changes in each card it may work to do it as an animation
Illustrator has a Data and Variables feature (window->variables) (which I have not used) that can handle graphics and linked files, as well as text.
Adobe Online Documentation: Data-driven graphics through templates and variables
