From the course: InDesign Secrets

181 The fastest way to find missing links - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign Secrets

181 The fastest way to find missing links

- Has this ever happened to you? You open up an innocent document, like I'm opening up this project called San Francisco Magazine, you get this horrible dialogue box, "This document contains 17 links to sources that are missing." And I open this up and I look at the Links panel and there's all those horrible stop signs. So some are found, but some are missing. I wanna show you a really fast way to find these missing files, assuming they are somewhere on your hard drive or on a connected hard drive or on a connected network server. That you have them, in other words. You don't have to say, "Okay, 2607.jpg," and then jump over to the Finder or to Windows Explorer and start riffling through folders and sections of my hard drive looking for this file. Instead, we're just going to relink this guy. Ans you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know all about relink, but normally you know about relink because you know where that file is, right? You're going to that actual folder and you're like, relink to this guy. But, you know, you can do that find and that relink in one step in your operating system. It's smoothest on the Macintosh, which is what I'm doing right here. We're gonna use this Find dialogue box up here. But Windows also has the ability to search in the Relink dialogue box. The search field is just tucked away in a corner of the Relink, so just keep an eye out for it. All you need to do is enter the file name in this Find field and let InDesign do the work for you. Even if you can't read the whole file name, sometimes this'll get truncated, you can just put in a partial name. So I'll put in 2607.jpg, and it's automatically doing a live search for names that match that. Please make sure to look at these options at the bottom. Show Import Options, turn that off because you're gonna go crazy cause we're going to keep this one turned on, Search for Missing Links in This Folder. Hopefully, whatever folder this item is in, there are other missing guys. And if we had Show Import Options turned on, we'd have to see that obnoxious Import Options dialogue box for each and every one. So don't worry about that, just turn on Search for Missing Links in This Folder. And this is the one that we want. Here's the folder. Ah, look, it's in the Stock Photos folder, that's interesting. Click Open, it found four. Didn't find 'em all, it found four of 'em. That's good to know. All you need to do is do that two or three times. Let's try this one. I'm gonna right-click on this and choose Relink. I can see it says extended here, extended1.jpg. There it is, select it, check my options, click Open. Did it find any more? Jackpot, 11 missing links, there you go. This is the fastest way to search for missing links, is simply to let InDesign do the work for you with the Relink dialogue box.

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