Comment 5 for bug 272520

Just my five cents worth: I would always prefer relative links for images, even if they are not in the current directory.

For example: I want to have
... << /home/blah/blah/blah/blah/blah
    SOME_SUBDIRECTORY
        project_1
            project_1.svg
        project_2
            project_2.svg
        ...
        maps_library
            australia.png
            ...

Then any linked image, e.g., maps_library/australia.png should be referred to by Inkscape relatively as:

../maps_library/australia.png
NOT:
/home/blah/blah/blah/blah/blah/SOME_SUBDIRECTORY/maps_library/australia.png

The main reason is link "breakage" - if someone takes a copy of "SOME_SUBDIRECTORY" away on their USB stick & tries to edit project_1.svg, then all links are broken.

If the links are relative, and they grabbed the whole sub-tree "SOME_SUBDIRECTORY", then everything will work.