Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Sharing an InDesign library with multiple users

According to InDesign Help, "libraries can be shared across servers, and across platforms, but only one person can have the library open at a time." This is true: InDesign won't normally let more than one person at a time open a library stored on a file server. But there's a workaround: just lock the library file.

On the Mac, select the library file in the Finder, choose File > Get Info, and click the Locked option. On Windows, right-click on the library file, choose Properties from the pop-up menu, and click the Read-only option.

Once you've done this, multiple users, even a mix of Windows and Macintosh users, can open the Library file simultaneously. Unfortunately, to make a change to the library you need to make sure no one else has it open, unlock it, open it in InDesign, make the desired change, and then lock the library once again.

(This multi-user limitation of Libraries is why I prefer to use Snippets instead of libraries in most situations. But that's topic for a future blog post.)

1 comment:

  1. Hi there,

    I was goggling for some info about using Library in InDesign and came across your blog. I got a question slightly related to this library issue.

    This is what's happening to me and I don't know how common this is; I'd have stored the frequently used images/banners in the library one day. Everything would be fine that way, all easy and convenient. Then when I opened this same library the next day, dragged an image into an indesign document, it'd appear that the image is gone, only the gray box was showing. When I selected the image to look at the link, here's the thing, the link is totally different from where it should be. Please note that the original location of the image had always been the same, the image was never moved, renamed, or altered in anyway. So this is the thing, the link of the image that I drag in from library seems to be changing? even though the image has always been in the same place. How is that even possible??

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