Cloud-agnostic relative paths for hotlinks, external drawings, Publisher Sets, and libraries

[Pato99]

Hi this was an old request in the now archived wishlist forum from 1904, pretty sure it had at least 10000 up-votes. In any case.

Please add relative links for the following:

1. Project Info

    Because automation is a thing now, I automate the creation of the .xml in every job folder and it needs to be painfully, manually imported for every job. When you open the project or update the drawing manager it should check for an update to the .xml file

2. Publishing Location

    More painful than having a baby I hear, is setting the publishing location in ArchiCAD each time a different user takes over a job.

3. Embedded Images, PDF's & DWG's

    a. QR Codes, magical, auto-generated goodness! Automatically dropped in the project folder should allow relative links into the title block, which would direct end users to a website to confirm plans are the latest set

    b. Details, Details, Details

[Burak]

I think those will be implemented in Archicad 39 🤔

[ammacdon]

Also would help reduce filing issues: relative file paths for publisher output locations; e.g.: pdfs should be saved on the file system relative to where the .pln is, not on an absolute path.

This functionality is already allowed when linking a pdf into the .pln file, but not oddly not when exporting a pdf.

[mendezarcediego]

[Moderator: Merged to existing wish. Merged Likes as well. Modified title to better reflect the full scope of the wish.]

Archicad stores external reference paths, including hotlinks, external drawings, Publisher Set output paths, and library locations, as absolute paths on the file system. This creates a systemic problem for any team working across multiple machines using cloud storage because cloud storage mount points are user-specific and machine-specific, particularly on macOS since the implementation of Apple File Provider.

On macOS, Dropbox is mounted at ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox and Google Drive at ~/Library/CloudStorage/GoogleDrive-[user@email.com]. Both paths are user-dependent. A Publisher Set or hotlink path set on one machine becomes unresolvable on any other team member's machine.

This breaks publishing workflows, external drawing updates, and hotlink management for any team not running a dedicated LAN file server.

There is already a partial wish for relative paths on hotlink modules specifically. This wish is broader and more urgent: the problem applies across every external reference type in Archicad, including hotlinks, Publisher Sets, Drawing Manager links, library paths, and XREFs.

The request: implement project-relative path storage as a first-class option across all external reference types, so that a path like ./references/topo.dwg resolves correctly regardless of which machine or user opens the file, as long as the folder structure is maintained. This is standard behavior in virtually every other file-based application that handles linked content.

This gap directly contradicts the Archicad Collaborate value proposition of cloud-first, infrastructure-free collaboration. Without this, any multi-user workflow requires a NAS or LAN file server, hardware that Collaborate is explicitly marketed as eliminating.

[Vilma Magelinskaite]

This is a real daily friction point. I recently had to manually update an entire Publisher Set just to publish from a different machine. Every path broken, one by one. This is not a edge case, it is the inevitable result of absolute paths in a cloud storage world.

Relative paths are standard in every other tool that handles linked content. The fact that Archicad still does not have this makes cloud based team workflows genuinely painful in practice.

[mendezarcediego]

@Ricardo Lopez What do you thin about this one? I think this one is a no-brainer...