I have a rather difficult problem. When I started my web site over a year ago, I selected objects for my pages from about 20 different folders on my hard drive. I didn’t know how many problems this would create for me since it was my first effort at building a web site. These folders on my hard drive have multiple images but only certain images are selected for my VSD program. I now have a web site that has about 90 pages and over 900 images. Site works wonderful but I need to get all my images to link to the objects in my “VNU_website/files” backup file on my hard drive or I’m going to have a problem later when trying to back up my program. In my VSD program most of my jpg and gif files point to folders outside the VNU-file folder.

The only way I have found to correct this is to change the name of the object in it’s original folder and then load VSD. I will then get an error message that the object can’t be found. Then I look at what is the name of missing object and point to the same object in my VNU-file folder. This corrects my problem for that object but it will be very difficult and slow to work through 90 pages with multiple jpg and gif objects on each page.

Is there a way to simply identify the link of an object on a page in VSD to it’s original location??? I could then move the object (jpg/gif) into the VNU-file folder. This would help a lot. Finding where it resides is difficult without a object name.

VSD is a great program and simple to use. I just need to correct some of the problems I created for myself. I should have put all my imported jpg & gif files in my “VNU-file” folder to start with. Images created within the VSD program are not a problem since they already exist in the VNU/files folder.

Thanks for your help.

Sorry, I'm using 5.9.4 version of VSD. Also, I tried to search for the solution and could not come up with an answer.

Thanks

First thing, you might consider upgrading to version 6. A new build was just released yesterday.

Second, you are out of luck, I'm afraid. When you add an image to a page VSD remembers it based on the location of the original. If that location ever changes the only method I know of to correct it is the laborious process you describe. The source images need to be stored somewhere easy to include with any backup operation so a restore puts them back into their original place(s), but that need probably isn't clear to most users (it wasn't to me) until after they run into the situation you describe.

I'm not positive but, if you put all the needed source images into a single new folder (I call mine "resources"), once you correct the link of the first image you might be able to get the rest of the site to go there as well. If it keeps asking you for locations after the first one, try exiting out of the operation (once you've specified at least one new location) and saving/re-loading the site to see whether it finds the rest of them in the same place.

You don't want to link to the "0.png" type images VSD creates in the files folder, though! Those can change and get re-numbered many times over the course of maintaining a site, and the contents of the files folder get over-written by the new versions pretty much every time you export. File "11.png" might be something totally different than you expect once things get changed and it re-numbers its internal naming scheme in response. You need to keep the "input" images separate from the "output" ones it creates for publishing.

Spinny,

Thanks for your reply. I was hoping there was an easier solution to my problem but I guess for the time being I will need to do it the hard way.

You really gave me a heads-up in another part of your answer. When you said do not link to any "0.png" file in the VNU/files folder because VSD re-numbers these files and any link would be lost when VSD re-numbers these files. I assume the same logic applies to any "IMG_XX.jpg" file in the files folder because these get re-numbered also.

Am I correct in understanding that all other .jpg and .gif files in the VNU/files folder are safe to link to but not "IMG.xx.jpg" and "XX.png" files because they will be renumbered at some point by VSD? This could be rather critical.

I guess I need to take the plunge and upgrade to version 6.4. Since I have quite a few external links, I was waiting until that issue was resolve.

I really appreciate your help.

Well I jumped in with both feet and upgraded my site to VSD 6.4.

With only a couple of glitches everything went great. I had one .jpg picture that linked to the wrong picture. Easy to correct. Don't know how this happened.

I did notice after the first upload using 6.4, which took some time, the second and third upload went much faster than 5.9.4. Wonderful.

Also, I was pleased to see that all of my external links worked great.

Excellent upgrade experience.

Thanks to Coffee Cup for a great program.