Indesign Excel Datamerge - Image Embedding Issues

Question

I’ve been running into extreme frustration with InDesign and Adobe lately.

I’m trying to embed images after a Data Merge, and despite multiple troubleshooting attempts, I can’t get it to work.

Here’s what I’ve tried:

Column headers in Excel prefixed with @images
Both relative and absolute paths
CSV UTF-8, comma-delimited sources
Tab-delimited text files

InDesign does recognize the image field (shows the image icon), but when I create the merged document, it cannot find the image. It seems to ignore the path I specify and constructs its own incorrect path.

Example:

InDesign looks for:
G:\OneDrive\Excels\Python-Image-Download-Rename\Filename.jpg
Correct path in my datasource:
G:\OneDrive\Excels\Python-Image-Download-Rename\downloaded_images\Filename.jpg

For some reason, it keeps omitting the \downloaded_images\ folder.

Getting Data Merge to work in InDesign is already tricky, but this issue with images is extremely frustrating. Over the past few weeks, I’ve encountered more and more problems, especially since the new version started corrupting some of my files.

Any help or insights would be greatly appreciated.

Red Point · Accepted Answer

Hi Dave,After some troubleshooting, I finally got the InDesign data merge working with embedded images. Here’s the approach that solved it:- Cleaned the file paths in the data source, removing all relative or absolute path information. I kept only the filename and extension (e.g., `filename.jpg`).- Exported the Excel spreadsheet to a tab-delimited text file to ensure compatibility with German umlauts and to avoid regional delimiter conflicts (e.g., `;` vs `,`).- Placed the exported text file in the same folder as the images, which turned out to be the key to making it all work. Cheers.

Dave Creamer of IDEAS · Answer

A few things to try/check out...Try a plain CSV file rather than the UTF one.What happens if you move the images (just a few as a test).Did you use the Links panel to copy the path?Do the image names have any "funky" characters in them?What happens if you rename the last folder in the path? Edit: Your second post showed up as I was typing mine, so ignore as needed.

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