We have seen this all too often: Someone packages and does not notice that the images in AI files are missing, and deletes all apparently unused files before archiving. And how are they supposed to know? Preflight does not detect it, and there is no warning on packaging. Nasty surprise when a new version is to be made five years later! If you are lucky, the hires PDFs used for printing are still available ...

I did a package of a 120 pp publication containing placed AI files with linked images from scattered volumes to produce a clean version for archiving, and discovered this problem. It would be a pain to gather all those links or embed them into each AI file before doing a new package. Someone suggested packaging each AI file separately as a stopgap solution. Still takes time as 95% of the pages are AI composed for layout and typo features.

Perhaps as a subfolder in the links folder named with the file name and _links ant the end? eg. Logo1.ai_links

Yes, please embed the links of the linked files themselves.

This is such a needed feature I’m a bit shocked it’s not included. Adobe controls the file formats of Photoshop and Illustrator. Even if giving InDesign the ability to parse the file to find all linked files is too complicated (and I can see how it could be) they could easily add InDesign readable metadata identifying necessary links. And if those links contain links and are saved in the same format InDesign could collect those links, too.

Would be a great time saver.

Agree. Great suggestion.

I would love ghis