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Known Participant
March 19, 2025
Question

Sharing InDesign Files Without Links

  • March 19, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 854 views

Hi!

Is there a way to send my InDesign file to someone to work on, and when they send it back, I can continue working on it without all of my images being unlinked?

Thank you!

2 replies

Peter Spier
Community Expert
Community Expert
March 19, 2025

Why not simply tell your asssociate to ignore the missing/modified links warnings and refrain from updating them?

MateomonoAuthor
Known Participant
March 19, 2025

Hi @Peter Spier Thank you for you response. 

Because when he sends me the file back with the updates, I need to update all of the links. If there were only a couple, it wouldn’t be a problem, but we have a lot of links.

Peter Kahrel
Community Expert
Community Expert
March 19, 2025

There are various scripts around that update all links in  a document. A Google search with

indesign script update all links

shows a lot of them.

Bill Silbert
Community Expert
Community Expert
March 19, 2025

Probably the safest way is to embed the links. You can select all of the links at once in the links panel by shift-clicking on all of their names and then choosing "Embed Link" under the links panel pull-down menu. If you need to later edit the links then you can reverse the process using "Unembed Link" that will appear in the links panel pull-down menu if a link has been previously embedded. When you do that you will get a message asking if you want to create a new folder for the linked image(s) or to link to the original source.

BobLevine
Community Expert
Community Expert
March 19, 2025

This one falls under the "it depends" category. If the OP has a bunch of icons embedded, that's fine. If we're talking about a lot of Photoshop and Illustrator files that add up to gigabytes, that is big time recipe for disaster.