"Change Picture" everywhere except Visio2010. How to update placed images

[thumbslinger]

For all the wrong reasons, we are using Visio for HMI flows. That means we have tons of screenshots of software screens that represent the path a user takes when clicking on various links/buttons of an application.

Once we get the screenshots in, an update is needed to lets say 30 of the images. As it stands, I haven't found a way to "update" the picture file without manually replacing each one. What should happen as it does in so many other applications is that when the saved/stored image is updated on the drive, upon opening the Visio drawing, all of the placed images should be updated.

is there some setting that actually embeds the images into the Visio? That would be the first step I suppose. But even Excel has the contextual entry "Change Picture" which would be even faster than manually updating scads of images but Visio doesn't.

I've developed a round-about way by actually using Illustrator which does allow linking so I'm actually just placing one big Illustrator file into a Visio drawing and can replace one Illustrator file per page in Visio but that doesn't seem right. Oh, and you say, "Why not just use Illustrator then?" because all engineers have Visio which we need to send docs to.

It's become the "PowerPoint" of layout, horribly enough, but then again, since I'm a designer and use the industry standards, when I have to venture off into stuff such as this I admit I don't know enough about Visio so I'm hoping I'm just missing something. Oh one more time, I've played with Data Objects....no go, they don't show the actual graphic, just a cruddy little box.

Thanks!

[Yacine]

Hi,
I did read your post, but did (honestly) lose the thread at some point.
What I understood, is that you do snapshots of drawings with certain settings and have difficulties to keep them synchronised as work evolves.
My first thought was to you might want save only the settings of the snapshot, so as to be able to refresh the actual snapshot to the current version of the drawing.
I did have a similar problem some time ago and posted this solution:
http://visguy.com/vgforum/index.php?topic=4773.msg18732#msg18732

Your perspective could now be to set up  a database where the screenshot is set by coordinates and other setting stored - whereever. Would define a screenshot and update it on need.

This to be understood as a first shot. Please have a look at my solution, and feel free to comment it..