Bulk relink images in InDesign when the path structure has changed

Question

We've got a load of images linked into an InDesign document which are linked like this:

user/documents/project-name/images/batch2/image1.png

The actual images are sub-filed like this images/batch1, images/batch2 etc.

These batch files contain the actual image files usually a mixture of .jpg and .png

There a several hundred batches - we use this file structure to make it easier to navigate when outside of InDesign (by the way they are not actually called "batch", they have numbers which are relevant internally to people working on the project).

Im aware that if i update one image in a batch folder, the rest of the ones in the folder will update, but this won´t help the other batch folders.

So is there a way the project-name in the path changes BUT the rest of the path stays the same? So that I can just update all linked images to use the new path without having to relink every image or every folder?

Answer 1

If your on a Mac this is what your after.

Indesign File Relinker.

I wrote this because often I will package a file and send it to someone. They will give it back to me later but the images are still all linked to the packaged folder. I wanted to relink them to my master image folder. This script first asks you if you want to relink i) All, ii) Missing or iii) Selected images. It then asks you to point to the top level directory where you are likely to find these images. It searches through every subdirectory relinking the images and saves an index file at the top level for next time. It can handle instances of images which have different modification dates too. Download it from here: http://www.drscripto.com/?p=8

Answer 2

The way I do it is to change the name of the Folder (containing the images currently linked) in Windows so that the Links are broken. Then when Indesign wants to relink, I point it to the new Folder. It finds the first link and automatically relinks the rest (as long as the names are the same).

Bit of a silly workaround but it works for me.

Answer 3

That is not possible, as far as I am aware within InDesign. What you could use is Markzware FlightCheck to package the images all together. This stand-alone preflight and packaging app will see images not linked, but located on your hard drive. You would need to use an advanced feature though, for as you described, the images are seen as missing. This would be in FlightCheck, File, Preferences and then choose the Images section.

There you can add Relative or Absolute paths to be scanned when preflighting your document(s). Then the images should then be 'seen' by FlightCheck and be available for collection. (File - Collect within FlightCheck, which is Package like in InDeisgn, but then with these "misplaced" images) The you would have them all together and they could be linked, as you also described with the batch update feature in InDeisgn. There is a full working demo of FlightCheck which you could use to try this.

Screen shot from FlightCheck Images section in Preferences: