Adobe InDesign CC - Essential Training

Working with other people's InDesign documents, missing images.

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hi there, in this video we're going to work with a file that's been sent to us by somebody else, and we're going to have some issues with the images not being loaded. And in the next video, we'll look at where the fonts are not being loaded.

First of all, let's go to 'File', 'Open', and download the exercise files, and in there is a file called '02 Existing Work'. Open that up, and there's 'Green at Heart Prospectus', open that up. And, warning, we're missing some images. It might say modified. Let's click 'OK'. It also might say we're missing fonts, and we'll do that in the next video. Basically this is what we've got. We have a document, but these images are missing. The weird thing is that I can see them, they're right there. Why can't I use those? Is it that they print really badly? They look okay on screen but they print really badly, so we need to link them back up.

Now this highlights one of the differences between InDesign and Word. Word, when you put in image inside of it, it kind of just packages it into the Docx file. When you send it to somebody, it comes along with it. With InDesign, by default, it likes to link to the images. Why do we do that? It's so that InDesign can run super-duper fast when it's only linking to it, whereas Word, if you work with a really big Word document with lots of images, you'll notice it runs really slowly, so that's the difference.

So when somebody sends you an InDesign file, be expecting the images to be along with it separately, often in a zip file. If you just get the InDesign file, and no images, you're kind of stuck. So you need to find those images, they might send them later, or they might just be hiding somewhere on your computer or the network drive at work, something like that. So we just need to relink them. So let's do that.

Over here, you can see my 'Links' panel, if you can't see it, go to 'Window', 'Links'. These are the images that are contained in my file. Now these ones have got the big red question mark, that means they are completely missing, so we're going to relink them. Yours might just say modified, mine had a yellow caution symbol here. Often you can just click on them, and this one here which says 'Update', and often there'll be no difference. You click on it, and our image will reload, but nothing will change. Often, that's just a quirk between Mac and PCs. Sometimes it's to do with the time zones. Often there's nothing different, keep an eye on it, just to check, but often there's no change.

In my case though, missing this completely. So, I'm going to try and find this 'Green Logo1'. I'm going to select it, and down here, there's this little chain icon, called 'Relink'. Click on him. And what I've done in your exercise files is, go back to the parent folder, and in here, there's this one here called 'Missing Footage'. Not sure why they call it footage, it should be missing images. And, in here, there it is, 'Green Logo1'. I'm going to click 'Open'. And it's gone and replaced it.

Now you can select more than one, so I've selected the first one, holding 'Shift', clicked the second one, go to 'Relink'. It's looking for this first one here called 'Table Top'. So I'm going to call this one 'Table Top'. Click 'Open'. And then I'm going to click this one that says 'Black'. Nice. So they're relinked, they're ready to go. They're not missing anymore. What you might find is, this word 'Content' here is pink. Looks kind of strange, it's because you're missing the fonts. So let's go in the next video and look at missing fonts, and fixing those.