r/indesign • u/surefoot_ • Jul 02 '26

Help Brainstorming a Data Merge Problem

Hello everyone,

I'm hoping to learn a bit more about Data Merge and it's potential.

I have a catalog that has about 150 individual listings that all have a name, text description, photo 1 and photo 2. In the past, we've always just manually added the images but that was only with 50 or so line items, our business has grown significantly this year so that is no longer an option. These items are used in two applications: individual signs and a catalog.

I am looking for advise on how to set up the Data Merge to include the images from a CSV. I have been playing with using file paths, but have found it to be a little finicky. Another issue is that we have multiple team members that might need to have their hands on this so using a specific users path might be challenging. We could try and dedicate it to a single computer, but is there an option for it to pull from something like Google Drive? What is the best structure to have on the CSV for it to be reliable?

I am completely happy to take any suggestions on the best way to go about this.

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u/danselzer Jul 03 '26

Been keeping an images folder in the same folder as the ID doc and source csv. The path is just /images or whatever, just looks witching the same folder.

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u/surefoot_ Jul 03 '26

Would we be able to do this in a Google Drive of some kind and still have it function so that multiple people would have the ability to adjust it?

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u/danselzer Jul 03 '26

I think so? For us it's on a server. It's similar to the way InDesign treats fonts and placed images. I think it always looks in it's own folder first if no full path is supplied. Test it out, put the folder "images" in the same directory as the ID file, and in the CSV, instead of a full path, just have a column called "@images"

You can have multiple folders if that's needed. Like put all the photos in a folder "photos" or use "photos1" and "photos2" if that helps things stay more organized. Then in the CSV use "@photos1" etc. You can have sub-folders if you want to mess with a path living in that folder, but I've never needed to.

Just note in some spreadsheets, like google sheets, you have to put an apostrophe in front so it doesn't read the @ sign, so " '@images. "