Lost file!

[ldg40]

I have a real live emergency here!!

Have a client who is coming to pick-up a brochure tommorow (Friday) The brochure is re-work and I had to add some more things to it. The file I added is an image and I used it while it resided on my desktop. Everything was fine and dandy, I saved my work, cleaned up my desktop and moved the new file to its proper place. Today when I went to open the brochure up it said that the file was missing, so I replaced it from with in the folder where it now is. That folder contains the fonts I used and the new image file, which is a sub-folder of the brochure folder. That made sense to me. Thats why I put into the folder with the fonts. Thought this would solve the issue. And did, untill I opened the cd with the brochure & font etc folder. It was easy enough to replace,went right where I wanted it, but who knows if the printer my client uses will take note. I did include this info in the file info creator comment area. Question is why wont the new image stay put?

[Scott]

When you place images in Illustrator, what you actually do is tell Illustrator where the file is located (a file path like -- hard drive/folder/folder/image.tif). Illustrator goes to that path and grabs the file data and imports it into Illustrator. If you move the image from that location, then reopen the file, Illustrator asks you "Okay where's that file? It's not where you said it was last time." This will happen every time you move the image file. It's pretty normal. Most major design software will handle linked images in this way.

If you've included the image file on the CD then the printer will find it. It's fairly common practice in prepress to open a file and have to relink all the images. Just be certain the linked images are always included when sending files to a printer.

The only real way to get around this is to place the application file and the image in the same directory. If you have a folder... and inside that fold are:

File.ai
image.tiff
Font Folder

Then Illustrator will first look for any files residing in the directory the file is in. It will see the image and use that. Or suggest to the user that "Hey I found this image is it the right one?"

No worries Linda, as long as you placed the image on the CD with the other files to go to the printer, I'm 99.99% certain the printer will know what to do with it (there's always that .01% idiot out there but you can't do much for those folks.)

[ldg40]

OOOHHhhh!:bow::bow::bow:

Thank you so much Jolt! I guess I can dig out the cds from the garbage. In the past I rarely used illustrator, if at all, but am making myself incorporate it (in baby steps).
So I've never ran across this issue before.

THANK YOU SO MUCH!! (caps intended!)

[Scott]

Glad I could help :)