Making InDesign recognise image paths to network drives when importing XML

Question

I work for a small publishing company, and we regularly create catalogues, brochures, etc., where we feature various hand-picked subsets of our available titles.

Based on the titles that are to be included in a catalogue, I create (in PHP, on my localhost, so very flexibly) an XML file with all the metadata of each book, including a link to the cover of the book.

All our cover images, named by the ISBN of the book in question, are located in a folder on a network drive that I log on to via Samba (authenticating with user name and password) and then mount on the desktop of my working machine (a Mac running OS X Yosemite).

I then import the XML file into an InDesign (CS6) document to layout the actual catalogue.

Everything about this work flow works perfectly and very elegantly—except for the fact that InDesign seemingly refuses to find any image whose href path leads to somewhere not on the local hard drive.

Various places online, I have found references (like page 6 of this PDF by Cari Jansen) that say that InDesign expects the href path to be formatted as follows (leaving out the href= bit and the quoting):

Image is in same folder as XML file: file:///image.jpg (or file:image.jpg)
Image is in a subfolder: file:///images/image.jpg
Image on hard drive, absolute path name: file:///Users/username/ Documents/Blablabla/images/image.jpg
Image is on another volume (server/network drive): file:///Volumes/VolumeName/RestOfPath

That’s as much description as I can find anywhere, but that does not work. At least not with files on this network drive.

If I give a relative path to a file in the same folder where the XML file is, or a subfolder, then it works fine. If I give an absolute path to a folder on the OS drive (i.e., /Users/username/Blablabla/...), it works fine, too.

But if I link to the file on the network drive, in the format file:///Volumes/NetworkDrive/CoverImages/9781234567890.ext, InDesign does not find the file. It just gives me a “Find file” dialog box where I can then select the image in the file list. Once I select the image and hit “OK”, it works fine: the image shows up. But that’s not particularly practical when I need perhaps 60 or 70 out of about 2,500 images in that folder.

I have of course made sure that the file I link to is actually there in the folder—in two ways. First, the path in the XML file is created automatically in PHP based basically on a glob search in the file list of that folder; and second, using cp (with the path copied from the XML file) to copy the image file to a folder on my local drive works just fine (so at least the OS X Terminal sees the /Volumes/NetworkDrive/CoverImages/9781234567890.ext as a completely valid one).

This happens with all files.

Is there no way of getting InDesign to accept image paths on (SMB) network drives?

(I have read and understood this question, but that deals with Data Merge, which—annoyingly—uses a different format for linking to files. And yes, I realise my method would mean the link to the images would break if I open the document while the network drive is not mounted—that’s a calculated drawback I’m willing to live with.)

Answer 1

I was having the same problem & tried various approaches to no avail. What eventually did work for me was manually linking my document to the requested images on the server using a shortened version of my XML file. Once inDesign imported the images I had it export the document to XML to see how it referred to those images. I then modified my XML files to match inDesign's example. Success!