Dropbox sharing for Designers - links to images in Illustrator ai files

[Johnheed]

I have noticed a problem with opening Illustrator ai files in dropbox. If I link all pictures and open later the same file everything works perfectly. If I open an ai file created by someone else, many pictures are not found and I'm supposed to find them and relink. If I relink, the person who created that ai file can not see them anymore and so on. All our team has the same difficulties. And that makes all work very uncomfortable. Maybe you could help us to solve such problem?

[Nina Quist]

Hi, thank you for taking up this issue – I am having the same issues with 'broken links' when working with a shared dropbox as a team with different users/usernames.

We share InDesign files saving directly into the dropbox shared folder. Linking to images in the dropbox shared folder. No issues there for the single user working with the dropbox desktop app. All good. BUT when another user opens the InD-file to work on it ALL links are broken as the path is specific to each user.

I suppose this is a InDesign preference that needs to be changed..? Or maybe even on my MacBook..? Or how can this issue be fixed when sharing a dropbox folder as a team?

[johnarmour003]

Hi,

We have dropbox and want to use Adobe Indesign to place links for the same account on multiple Mac OS machines. When placing links into Indesign the path links to the users home directory which is different for each user. We need a method of placing links from the same path.

[Rich]

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@johnarmour003 wrote:

When placing links into Indesign the path links to the users home directory which is different for each user. We need a method of placing links from the same path.

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That's not something Dropbox can solve for you. Most applications, when linking to external files, use the file's full path, which will be different for each user when those files are stored in their user profile. Dropbox has no control over that.

The only solution involving Dropbox is to have every user move their Dropbox folder to a common location, such as the root of your system drive, so all links are identical, but that will no longer be possible on Macs since Apple now requires the Dropbox folder to be located in the user's CloudStorage folder.

[ranezra]

The only solution I've found is to put the AI project files in the same folder with the linked files (use 1 folder, not subfolders).