As Quark users you could find utility usage pictures in your sleep. Well we don’t have the utilities, you will see and we don’t have usage and pictures, instead we have a Links pane. The thing I like about the fact that its pallet is this possible to have it open all the time so you can constantly monitor the status of your photos.

Here are the photos and graphics we have used in this document. I can have it sort them by Name, Page, Type or Status. Status is the default. I tend to stick with the Status that way if I am working on a document with lots of graphics and one becomes missing or modified, it will move to the top and I can see it very quickly. Just like QuarkXPress, when you place a graphic on a page you are not really placing the graphic on a page, what you are doing is placing a low res preview of that graphic on a page. So when you send your InDesign document to someone, you want to make sure you send those links.

There are exceptions to this however. The Dance Machine logo for example, it’s an Adobe Illustrator file. Let’s I want to send this document to someone and I want to make sure that logo is there, no matter what. It's possible for me to go to the flyout menu at the Links pallet and choose Embed File. When I do that, a little icon shows up right here and a full working version of this graphic is in the InDesign file. You got to be careful though. You start placing 20 megabyte photographs in your InDesign file and all the sudden moving your InDesign files, it's going to be like moving a piano. Only use it on a need to do basis.

Now let’s say that I emailed you this document and you want to edit this logo. Well, there is not external file for you to edit, it's embedded. It's possible for me to un-embed the file. It will ask me, do you do you want to link to the original file? I don’t have it, so I can click No and I can tell it where to save that file and when I hit OK it will un-embed that graphic in the original form to where I choose and then I can open it in Illustrator or Photoshop or whatever format the original photo was.

Another thing I like about the Links pane and how it behaves in InDesign, is it’s very easy for me to relink photos. If I have got two versions of this file a high and a low res, I can click on the file listed in the Links pallet click, Relink and I can tell it the new picture I want to relink to.

If you got a graphic selected and you want to edit the original, you can click on the pencil right down here or you can hold your Alt or Option key down and double-click on the photograph or graphic, in which case it will launch the authoring application as you can see Photoshop is launching right now, because this is raster graphic and Adobe Illustrator file or other Vector graphics will open up in Illustrator. Let’s go back to InDesign.