You can access your Dash assets from within the Adobe Creative Cloud and Microsoft Office product suites using our integration with LinkrUI.
What can you do with LinkrUI?
With our LinkrUI integration, you can access your Dash assets from within external applications and download assets straight into your documents. You can:
Search and browse your Dash assets from within supported 3rd party applications (see below for the full list).
Download Dash assets directly into your documents.
Upload modified assets back to Dash as a new version of an existing asset.
What applications are supported?
LinkrUI for Adobe supports the following applications in both Windows and MacOS:
Adobe Creative Cloud
Photoshop
Illustrator
InDesign
Premier Pro
After Effects
Microsoft Office
Powerpoint
Word
Excel
Installing LinkrUI
Before you get started, you'll need to install LinkrUI on your machine. You can find instructions on how to do this in the following articles:
Using LinkrUI
Here is an overview by the LinkrUI team showing what you can do with LinkrUI:
The below sections summarise the main things you can do with LinkrUI. Bear in mind the interface and specific functions can differ between Adobe/Office applications, as well as between applications themselves, depending on the needs of the application and the intended workflow.
Searching and browsing
You can locate an asset in various ways:
Simply browse the folder structure until you see the asset you need.
Use the search box to enter any search term. This will search all of the same asset metadata that the usual Dash search does.
Browsing your collections
You can browse your Dash collections by clicking the Collections dropdown list to the left of the search bar.
This will show your list of collections, which you can then choose from to see the assets in that collection.
To search for assets within the collection, first select your collection then enter a search term and the list will be filtered.
Downloading assets
Once you have found the asset you'd like to add to your document, simply drag it to the document area to place it. Alternatively, click the three dots to the right of the asset filename and choose "Place" (to place it within an existing document) or "Open" (to open it as its own new document).
Your asset is now added to your document or opened in a new one 🙂.
Uploading a new version of an asset
Let's say you've made an edit in Photoshop to an asset you have downloaded via LinkrUI, and you'd like to update your Dash asset with the new version, using Dash's versioning feature. Here's how you do it:
Make sure you have saved the updated image in Photoshop. This should be saved as the same image format as originally used - don't convert it to a different format such as PSD.
You will notice a red triangle shows in the panel by the asset, indicating there is a version discrepancy now between the local asset and the lcoud asset.
Click the three dot menu to the right of the filename and choose "Update".
The local asset will be uploaded to Dash as a new version.
Using cloud links
LinkrUI keeps track of every asset you add to Dash, so it always maintains a link between the locally-downloaded asset and the corresponding asset that exists in Dash. This is useful if you have opened the document on a different computer and want to carry on with your work, for example uploading new versions back to Dash.
To view the links relating to your document, click the Links icon at the bottom of the LinkrUI panel:
From here, you can:
Relink the local asset to the cloud asset
Relink the cloud asset to the local asset
Storing documents in Dash
You can store your documents in Dash. This works exactly the same as an asset itself - if you update the document locally, LinkrUI will inform you that the cloud version is now out of date and gives you the chance to update it.
Here you can see that the local file has been updated:
To update the Dash/cloud version of the document, click the document icon and then click "Update".
Frequently Asked Questions
What happens if a new version of a Dash asset is added to Dash by another user while I'm working on it locally?
In this scenario, LinkrUI will spot this has happened and will automatically ask you if you would like to update your local version of the asset with the new version from the cloud.
If someone else opens an InDesign document on their computer, will the Dash assets still be there?
So long as every user who opens the InDesign document has the LinkrUI plugin installed and logged in to the same Dash, they will each be able to see the full-res Dash assets in the document, as LinkrUI maintains a link between the local and the cloud assets.
If a user opens the document who doesn't have LinkrUI installed, the document will show a low-res cached version of the embedded asset. This should be fine for general editing, but will be less suitable for exporting the document where high-res imagery is required. In this situation, either install the LinkrUI plugin or re-open the document on a machine that has the plugin already installed.