Moving Framemaker Documents and Referenced Images

[QuintinSeegers]

Hi,

After using Unstructured Framemaker for 7 years, our file directories have become very disorganised, with documents containted in Framemaker books scattered across multiple folders and images referenced in documents equally scattered across multiple folders.

We want to reorganise our Framemaker Documents and Referenced Images. However, we've found that doing so, messes up the reference paths to images and document references in the book. We're talking in the region of  30 plus Framemaker Books, each containing 10+ documents and referencing in excess of 1000 images.

Does anyone know of a way to move framemaker documents and referenced images withour having to redo all the image and document references? We're currently using v2017, but is just about to upgrade to v2019.

[LinSims]

Rick Quatro's ArchiveES script should do what you need on a book by book basis. Open a book file, run the script, choose a folder, and the script copies all of the files in the book, any text insets, and graphics into the chosen folder. The book and chapter files are at the top level, and there's a text inset and a graphics directory. All paths in the files are updated to use the new relative paths, so all your referenced files come in correctly.

Mind you, if you have files shared between multiple books, you're going to get a lot of duplication and, obviously, a change made to one of the new copies in one book isn't going to show up in the other books

[QuintinSeegers]

Unfortunately the documents and images are not book-specific. Some of the documents (some also contain text inserts) and images are shared across multiple books. The same image could be used in multiple documents.

Perhaps the upgrade to v2019 is the best time to do a massive tidy-up (albeit manual). I was hoping for a easy solution, but it seems I'm out of luck.

[LinSims]

In that case, maybe PathChanger would work? 

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PathChanger is a program for globally updating paths to imported graphics, text insets, external cross-references, and book components. PathChanger writes all of your document or book references to a simple .csv file that can be opened and edited in Excel. The changes can then be written back to FrameMaker, updating hundreds of broken links at once.

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[frameexpert]

Thank you Lin for the recommendations! Yes, PathChanger was designed for this very purpose. It is much easier to update the paths in Excel than it is to do it interactively in FrameMaker.