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Forum Discussion
Johnheed
5 years agoNew member | Level 2
Dropbox sharing for Designers - links to images in Illustrator ai files
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, ma...
- 3 years agoHey bananasplit, sorry to hear you're having issues with this.
It sounds like the links you're referring to are relative links and you might be better off using absolute links instead.
I won't be able to offer any help with that though as it falls outside of our remit.
That said, I'm not aware of a way to achieve what you had in mind, but I'll leave this thread open in case another user on the Community has something to offer here.
Let me know if you have any other questions in the meantime.
Rich
Super User II
This isn't a Dropbox issue. This happens because applications typically use the full path when linking other files, and everyone's Dropbox is usually stored in a different location on their drive.
The Dropbox folder on your computer (let's assume Windows for now) is typically located in your user profile, which would be C:\Users\Johnheed\Dropbox. For me, it's C:\Users\Rich\Dropbox. If you embed an image or other file into your project, the embedded path will be something like C:\Users\Johnheed\Dropbox\SomeFolder\SomeFile.jpg. Since the Johnheed user folder doesn't exist on my computer, when I open that project, the embedded files won't be found.
The only way to resolve this is to ensure that everyone's Dropbox folder is stored in the exact same location, such as C:\Dropbox, and any shared folder is named the same across all users. Bascially, the embedded path has to be identical across all computers that will be opening the files.
Johnheed
5 years agoNew member | Level 2
Hi Rich, thanks. We are on all on Macs and some designers are on PC/Windows. So what would be the embedded path example for this? I'm not clear on what your saying or how to solve this across multiple users.
We work off a team Dropbox account and where the design team access the ai files AND the images that are linked to it never change. Also would syncing/uncyncing folders all the time impact this as well?
- Lusil5 years agoDropbox Staff
Hey Johnheed, thanks for reaching out to us about this.
I found this thread for you to check out where users discuss more on this.
Hope it helps!
- Rich5 years agoSuper User II
Johnheed wrote:
We are on all on Macs and some designers are on PC/Windows. So what would be the embedded path example for this?
There really is no solution for this that will work across multiple platforms. The only real solution is to get the application developers to support relative paths.
Здравко wrote:
... but set relative links would solve your problem (likely).
The problem is that most programs embed files using the full path to the file. Relative paths usually aren't an option. This is common across many different applications.
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