“How can I export a list of all the images I’ve placed into my InDesign CS4 file?” asked one of the attendees at the InDesign Conference (winding up today in Washington DC) yesterday. “I need to send a text file of these to my client’s vendor with every job.”
Mike Ninness was on the stage, pausing between tips he was demo-ing for his “Power Keyboard Shortcuts” session, and started looking around the interface. A Print icon in the Links panel status bar? No. An “Export Link Names” command in the Links panel menu? No.
In InDesign CS3, the attendee said, she could copy each link name one by one from the Link Information dialog box and paste them into a text file. But you can’t do that with CS4’s Link Info panel.
Mike was ultimately unsuccessful, and none of the suggestions other audience members (including myself) suggested were entirely satisfactory. The closest we came to a solution was another attendee’s suggestion to choose File > Package, click the Report button, then click the Cancel button to cancel the package. InDesign still creates a Package Report text file which lists every image used in the file, which is good, but the names are buried in lots of other information for each linked file, which was not the push button solution the first attendee was hoping for.
Noha to the Rescue
Luckily, Noha Edell (Adobe’s wonder woman of the east coast) was in the audience, and she remembered that at a recent Washington D.C. InDesign user group meeting, someone had demo’d a script that came close to what the conference attendee needed. Noha e-mailed the user group member last night and asked him if he could tweak the script and send it on so she could make it available to the conference audience (via this post to InDesignSecrets) today.
So … we aim to please! You can download imagescripts.zip and then unzip the file. You’ll have two AppleScripts (sorry Windows users) written by Hanaan Rosenthal that you can drop into your InDesign Scripts folder.
Then, when you want to create a text file of the filenames in your Links panel, open your Scripts panel (Window > Automation > Scripts) and double-click either Print Links Simple.scpt or Print Links Advanced.scpt entry to generate a text file.
On the left is the result of the Simple script, on the right the result of the Advanced script. So, thank you Noha and Hanaan!
This article was last modified on December 20, 2021
This article was first published on November 6, 2009
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