This is such a ridiculous thing not to be available in Illustrator, for creating any artwork for exhibition panels or the like it's vital. Adobe - sort it out PLEASE.

Would ultimately like a control to be able to type in the percentage scale of linked file a la indesign.

Here I was, thinking there was a solution, but it's a feature request. ugh

Thanks for the script idea. It may be helpful in some situations, but it doesn't exactly solve the issue, since it resets everything and I could almost just as easily re-import the image.

The problem is the most troublesome when an image is stretched out of proportion and I need to square it back up again.

To answer your question about the Scaling tool, yes the scaling tool is good for scaling an object to a specific percentage, but it always starts at 100%, even if an image was previously scaled. With Indesign and Photoshop, there is the ability to see whatever percentage an object had been scaled to and adjust it to something else. For instance, if an image was scaled to 84% and I wanted it to be 88% instead, I could just change it to 88% instead of using my calculator to figure out that I need to scale it up 104.762%.

If Adobe were to add the ability to adjust the scaling, it would solve the whole problem, because an image that had been scaled to 67% horizontal and 72% vertical could easily be adjusted to 70% for both, or whatever was desired, thus squaring up the pixels.

There are several ways to achieve this in Illustrator.

1. Use one of free scripts to reset the image scaling to the one it has on import: WR-descaleimages, UnScale, ReTransform... thye fact we have that many definitely means this should be just a default thing!

2. Use a commercial plugin Rasterino, which allow to set a custom resolution to an imaged and thus scale it, and uniform the scaling ratio.

As for the percentage scaling — well, Ai can scale anything, just with the Scale tool dialog or Transform Each dialog. How does it differ from the way you want to scale them?

why this is still not a thing? i really need that feature

Why can't they just have a simple height & width percentage button like every other creative programme on the surface of the planet does? Including InDesign & Photoshop.

Adobe can be quite baffling sometimes.

Please add a way to modify the scaling of a linked image after it's been placed into Illustrator. Sometimes, when an image gets out of proportion, it is difficult to get it back in proportion. Also, it would be nice to scale a link to a specific percentage. Indesign has this feature, and it would be nice to have it continue through into Illustrator as well.