Remove all missing links in InDesign with this awesome script

Sometimes you have the pleasure to work with InDesign files that are over 600 pages long and that have a lot of missing images.

My designer colleagues tried to remove them one by one manually.

Luckily if you know how to script, you won't have to do manual work if you're clever enough. At least most of the time.

Save the following code as a .jsx file and run it in ExtendScript on Adobe InDesign. I work with CS6 but it should work anywhere.

// Removes all missing images in the active document.
// Keeps the frames.
 
if (app.documents.length == 0)
  alert('No documents are open. Please open a document and try again.')
var doc = app.activeDocument
var links = doc.links
 
for (var i = 0; i < links.length; i++) {
  if (links[i].status == LinkStatus.LINK_MISSING) {
    links[i].parent.remove()
  }
}

See what horror I'd have to go through if I wasn't able to make this script? I know this is not always a good solution in many environments.

But it worked for me and the code is simple enough that you would be able to adapt it to your own use case. It's a good starting point.

Oh, it removes all the missing links and keeps the frames. So keep that in mind.

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