InDesign Shorts: Tip #9 – Relinking Multiple Images

InDesign Shorts is a recurring series to help everyone of all levels master the ins and outs of the program and become more efficient designers. Got a burning InDesign question? Drop a comment below or join the LinkedIn group for more.

I sat down at my computer one day, thinking it was a morning like any other. I hadn’t had even had my first cup of tea yet, but that would be the least of my worries because when I opened my most recent proposal file all of my links were broken. Every. Single. One. It turns out someone had thought it would be a great idea to reorganize the images on the server (and honestly, they probably needed to be organized) but hadn’t let anyone in the office know that’s what they were doing. Ugh…

At the time, I didn’t know how to relink multiple images at once. I think I was working on an old version of InDesign too, so I’m not even sure it was an option. But now? It’s a super timesaver.

Anyway, if you’ve ever dealt with multiple broken links then you probably know what to do here. This tip is preemptive, for that inevitable day when something like this happens. It’ll help speed up the process of linking all of those images back up.

Simply highlight one of the images that’s broken and open the ‘Links’ dashboard. (If you don’t have this in your sidebar menus, you can access it through the ‘Window’ menu, or by hitting ctrl+shift+d.) Then select the ‘Relink’ option (it looks like two chain links). This will open a new window that you’ll use to navigate to the new link location. Once you find the image you’re looking for, make sure you check the box to ‘Search for Missing Links in This Folder’. It’s highly likely that you have multiple broken images in the same folder, so checking this option tells InDesign to search the document for other broken links and check them against the new folder directory.

Once you hit ‘Open’, InDesign will search the folder for missing links and will give a pop up that says ‘Found and Relinked XX Images.’

You’ll need to repeat this with other folder/link locations because InDesign only checks the folder you’ve specified. (i.e. if you have your photos organized by project, then you will need to relink at least one image in each project folder for InDesign to find the rest of the related project images in that folder).