OT: Is there an easy way to manage graphics shared in many FM files?

[Rene Stephenson]

Hi All,

We have a library of a few dozen books (about 10,000 pages), and many of the files use the same graphics or composites built from shared graphics. We've run upon a challenge, though, in that things have gotten complex enough that we can't always use subfolders to group the graphics in a logical way so that we know where to look to find them. To complicate matters, we have recently endured several rounds of layoffs that have rather drastically diminished our team to just me and a trainer and our boss. :-\  The graphic artist was the last of our casualties.

I am now discovering how much our artist was keeping in his head. Now, I know the idea of cataloging or browsing graphics is really probably out of scope for any desktop publishing application, but when you're dealing with graphic-intensive books in FM, with so much content to manage...! We have single-sourced about 75% of the projects, so the text part of the FM files is in manageable condition, thanks to insets, shared files, conditional text, variables, and the like. But the graphics...! Egads! We really need to simplify and find a way to quickly locate and identify the graphics files!

I'm wondering whether we could use the source graphics rather than the output files. The source files include CDR, AI, DWG, DXF, and VSD files. All of those were being output to TIFF or JPG for use in FM. I have heard that FM is supposed to import CDR files, but using FM 7.2 I haven't had very good luck (possibly my mistakes).

I'm also thinking about file structure in that right now, we have the books grouped by product and the output graphics in the product directories at the same "tree" or path level as the FM files folder for the product. Aren't there some limitations about how long the path can be or how many folders up and down the path between the container doc and the graphic you're inserting that can impact FM ability to display the images? It seems like about 5 of the ..\..\..\ things in the referenced file path causes an issue...?

And the other thing that's brewing in my mind is, surely there's some program somewhere that catalogs graphics of various file formats when you provide a path or group of paths for a repository...??

Given the tech market and economic rollercoaster of the last few years, I know I'm not the only writer to find myself in this position. Any insight that any of you can provide would be greatly appreciated!
 
Rene L. Stephenson