Moving Images Linked in Illustrator to New Drive

[adamdanielmedia]

I have multiple Illustrator projects, all of which contain links to images from different subfolders of one common master folder. I need to move that master folder of images to a different drive, which I assume will break all the link paths in my AI files. I know I can go file by file fixing the links, but that would take way too long... Is there a way to point Illustrator to the folder on the new drive more globally, so I don't have to work project by project, or am I out of luck?

[S_Gans · Accepted solution]

Judging by the number of views and lack of responses on this, it seems that others are in the same position as I - I can not think of any easy way to do this. However, if it was me, what I'd likely do- just so I don't have to fix all my links - is open each dependent document and choose File>Package. That'd create a new folder with the Illustrator document and copies of all the files that're dependencies. You may have a lot of big files and duplicates on your system, but the documents will remain editable (I assume that's your reason for choosing not to embed all the links), and you won't have to worry about file paths. 
I wish I had a better suggestion, but that may help.

[adamdanielmedia]

Thanks for your reply. Wish it was better news!

I'd considered packaging all my AI files but decided against it for the reasons you mentioned, and also the time it would take to process each file.

I think I'm just going to have to let the links break. I'll probably (hopefully) never need to revisit 95% of my AI files and I guess I'll deal with the 5% as they come.