Linked Files in Illustrator Do Not Preserve Original Size

Forum|Forum|3 months ago
November 10, 2025
1 reply
243 views

Hi Adobe team,

I’m running into a frustrating issue with Place → Link in Illustrator. When I edit the original linked file, the object in my AI document does not keep its original size. Even using Relink doesn’t help — Illustrator scales or stretches the linked object according to the old document transform.

This makes working with linked files extremely inconvenient. It would be great if linked files could always insert and update at their original size without any manual resizing.

Please consider fixing this in a future update.

Thanks!

Ton Frederiks

Community Expert

"Illustrator scales or stretches the linked object according to the old document transform."

Do you mean you have scaled/transformed the image in Illustrator and don't want that when relinking?

Have a look at the options in the Links panel.

godortneoAuthor

Participant

Thanks for the reply!

No, I didn’t scale or transform the linked image manually. The issue is that when I update or relink the file, Illustrator changes its size automatically — it no longer matches the original dimensions of the source file.

It seems to happen when the artboard or resolution of the source file changes, even slightly. I’d like Illustrator to have an option to keep the link at the original (1:1) size of the updated file, not the old scaled transform from before.

Ton Frederiks

Community Expert

Does any of the options in the links panel do what you want?

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