What is Linking vs. Embedding in InDesign?

A. Linking vs. Embedding

When you embed assets in a layout, you put all your eggs in one basket.

If one file gets corrupted, all your work is gone.

Embedding assets is tempting, and I see many new creatives opting for it. They’re tempted by the fact that embedding means fewer—or no—external assets. They like the idea of having just one file to move around, never having to worry about network paths remapping or forgetting to copy PSD from this other folder onto their USB drives to work on the layout at home.

Sure, a layout with all or a significant portion of its imagery and copy embedded is easier to deal with, easier to manage, and easier to send to a thumb drive or DVD-ROM, but it’s not worth the risk. Eggs. Basket. Splat. Weeks of work oozing out all over the linoleum. I like being right as much as the next guy, but I hate being proven right on the linking versus embedding debate. It truly saddens me when somebody comes up to me long-faced at a conference and begs me to help him fix a corrupted document wherein he has embedded all his images.

Sure, I know a few tricks I can try (most are somewhere in this tome), but it’s a rare occasion when they work; if all the safeguards have failed, there just isn’t much to be done to resurrect a truly corrupt INDD. At that point, it’s a matter of re-creating the document. If all the assets are external, the work is lot less than if they were all embedded and must also be re-created from scratch.

If that doesn’t dissuade you from embedding assets, maybe this will: Remember the urn? If you embed, you potentially lose the ability to quickly and easily edit original artwork. Images placed as links and then embedded can often be extracted back to an editable state, but artwork brought in via paste or drag and drop from an application are instantly frozen into EPS or TIFF formats— good-bye live effects, good-bye layers, good-bye to a lot of stuff.

Opinions differ on the linking versus embedding debate. Some—including a few gurus whom I admire—say embedding is fine, that there are enough safeguards in place with InDesign’s Saved-Data and extremely stable file format. In my experience, having done page layout and compositing for all these years, having looked into the faces of misty-eyed owners of unopenable documents, and having researched enough technical support cases wherein months’ worth of work was lost due to a simple power surge or mistimed network backup, embedding anything that will take longer than 5 minutes to re-create—cumulatively—is, in my opinion, a bad idea.