Now supporting URL’s as image paths

One of the most requested features for Cacidi Extreme and LiveMerge has for years been the ability to use a web images, with a web URL as an images in a catalogue production. That has not been possible for a number of reasons.. e.g the lack of a way to select the images, and even if we had that, we would have to drop the idea on a link to an image when we want to show, export and print the image, and a missing modification date on URL is also trouble.

With the 18.0.6 versions of Cacidi Extreme/Extreme Light and Cacidi LiveMerge/LiveMerge Light, we are now supporting the use of URL’s as image links, in the easiest possible way.

To be able to use an URL, we are doing it by downloading the image to a local folder, and then place the image in InDesign. And it will be able to print, export and view the image in InDesign. You can say, we are automating the process of downloading the images, correct the file path, and everything is done in the fly. Images added on a later state, will be added to the local folder.

If your field for the image is a direct link to an image, like this https:://www.cacidi.com/html/images/Raspberries.jpg, Extreme/liveMerge will detect that the images could be online, and will, if the image not is available in the local cache, download the image to the cache folder, giving it the name as the last part of the URL path, in this case “Raspberries.jpg”.. If the images already are in the cache folder, the download will be skipped, but the images will be placed.

Setting the cache folder is easy too, just point to the folder as the image path in the project setting, and you are ready. If you at some point, want to clear the cache folder, just delete all the images, and if images on a later state is needed, Cacidi LiveMerge/LiveMerge will auto download the images again.. so simple.

You can download a test data file for the 13-Fruit tutorial, that’s pointing to images on our website.

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