How to Clean Up Links in Illustrator

When you place artwork in Adobe Illustrator and choose to link to it rather than embed it in your file, your external graphic remains external. If you move, rename or modify the graphic outside Adobe Illustrator, your link to the file becomes out of date. Unless you update the link and refresh Illustrator's access to the file, you won't be able to print or export your document successfully. Every time you work on a linked graphic in the application in which you created it and change its content, or change the file's name or location, make sure you take a trip to the Adobe Illustrator Links panel to tidy up your file connections.

Instructions

1. Choose Links from the Window menu to bring up the Links panel on your screen if it's not already visible. Examine each link entry. If you see a red dot at the right side of the entry, Adobe Illustrator can't find your file because you've moved or renamed it. If you see a yellow triangle with an exclamation point inside it, that's Adobe Illustrator's way of warning you that your link is out of date because you modified your graphic since you place it.

2. Click once on the Links panel entry for a graphic that's marked as modified. Click on the Update Link button at the bottom of the Links panel or open the fly-out menu at the top right corner of the Links panel and choose Update Link. Adobe Illustrator updates the link. Its listing no longer displays the "modified" symbol.

3. Click once on the Links panel entry for a graphic that's shown as missing. Click on the Relink button at the bottom of the Links panel or open the fly-out menu at the top right corner of the Links panel and choose Relink. When the Relink dialog box comes up on your screen, navigate to the location of the file you moved or renamed or the replacement you want to substitute for the original linked file. Click on the Place button to complete the relinking procedure.

Tips & Warnings

• If your Adobe Illustrator Links panel shows multiple missing graphics and you've stored all of them together in one folder, select all of them in the Links panel, then update the first one. Adobe Illustrator automatically brings the Place dialog box back up so you can update the rest of the missing graphics.

• You can bring up the original artwork file for any graphic that's linked to an Adobe Illustrator file by selecting its entry in the Links panel and clicking on the Edit Original button at the bottom of the Links panel or opening the fly-out menu at the top right corner of the Links panel and choosing Edit Link. This procedure opens the application necessary to edit the graphic if the program isn't already running.

• Unless you change Adobe Illustrator's default linking preference, the program will alert you to out-of-date links and ask you to refresh them. You can turn off the automatic alerts by visiting Illustrator's File Handling & Clipboard preferences.

• If you share your Adobe Illustrator artwork with others, make sure you send your file's linked graphics along with your main Illustrator document.

References

• Adobe Systems: Using Adobe Illustrator CS5
• "The Adobe Illustrator CS5 Wow! Book"; Sharon Steuer; 2010
• "Adobe Creative Suite 5 Design Premium All-in-One for Dummies"; Jennifer Smith, et al.; 2010
• "Illustrator CS5 for Windows and Macintosh Visual QuickStart Guide"; Elaine Weinmann, et al.; 2011