From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Using the Links panel - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Using the Links panel

- [Narrator] I'm going to open this file from the exercise files folder by double clicking on it. That's the one that ends with a B. And when InDesign opens the file, I get this alert saying there are issues with links. What's that about? Well, when you import a picture into InDesign by using place or dragging in a file from disc, InDesign doesn't actually embed the image into your document. Instead, you get a thumbnail preview of the image and a link to the file on disc. And this happens with any image file, whether you import a PDF or a JPEG or Photoshop file or whatever. And so when I open this document, InDesign went looking for all the linked images on disc, and one of them was totally missing. It just couldn't find it. And another image had been modified. That is someone had edited the image since the last time I imported it. So InDesign is asking me, what do you want to do? If I click on update modified links, it will update all the modified ones. It won't know what to do about the missing one, but in this case, I'm actually not going to do that. I'm going to click don't update links because I want to show you how to take care of this yourself. The key to fixing these is the links panel over here in the dock on the right side of the screen. Or you can find it in the window menu. The links panel is like the control central for all of your linked graphics. All the placed images that you have in your document will show up here, and it gives you information about those links as well. Let's make this panel bigger by dragging the lower left corner of it and see how you can drag this little divider line up at the top. That gives us more room to see the name. Anyway, you can see the two alerts up here. The red one with a question mark says it's missing. And the yellow one is modified. If there's no alert icon at all, like all these other ones, that means they're okay. It knows where to find those files and they're up to date. Now, the Links panel can actually tell you other information about your linked images as well. For example, if I click on this image here, it'll show me down at the bottom of the panel a bunch of information about it. You may need to click this little twirly triangle in order to see the link info section. It's a good idea to scroll through all of this and look at the link info to get a sense of what the images are inside your file. Now, there are a couple more things that I want to show you about the links panel itself before we fix these image problems. First of all, you can see that our images up here are in page order from the beginning of the document to the end. But if I click the little status icon up here at the top, it groups all of the problem images together. I just find that makes it easier to spot them. Okay, let's go ahead and fix this modified image. Now, I may not know where in my document this image is right now, so I can click on this little underline number in the right column, and that takes me right to the image. It even selects the image inside the frame. I'll zoom into 200% by pressing Command + 2 or CTRL + 2 on Windows, and you can see that this is the image that's been modified. You'll notice that in the upper left corner of the frame, I get the same modified icon. And once again, this means that somebody has changed this image since the last time that I imported it into the document. So in order to update this to the newest version, I have several different choices. I could click the update link button in the middle of the links panel here, or I could double click the modified icon link right next to the image name. But what I usually do, the fastest method is just click once on the icon that's attached to the image. As soon as I click on it, it updates the image. Alright, let's go ahead and take care of this missing image. Here in the links panel, I can see that it's missing. And let's jump to the image by pressing the number three in the right column. Now I'll zoom into 200% again with the Command or CTRL + 2. Now it's my job to tell InDesign where this image is on disc so that we can reimport it and have a good link. And there are multiple ways to relink this to a new image. I could click on the Re-link button down here in the middle of the panel, or I could go to the links panel menu and choose Re-link. But again, what I usually do is click once on the little icon attached to the image. So now InDesign asks me where I should find this image. So let's go look for it. It should be in the links folder inside the exercise files folder. And there's a little helpful clue right here at the top of the dialect box that you should pay attention to. InDesign shows me the name of the file that I'm looking for, and I can see that it's looking for something that ends with the word draft. And now I know what happened to it. That file was a draft version that I threw away a long time ago. We're never going to find it, but we can replace it with a new version. I'll just click down here and press the letter L to jump to the file called Logo_StackedFinal.ai. That's the final version. So when I click Open, InDesign throws away the old version and it puts the new version in its place. So we're good to go. Now I need to be clear about this. Before you print or export your documents, it's really important that all your images be up to date in the links panel, not missing or modified, or else InDesign will only be able to use the low resolution preview and your output may not look right.

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