How can I batch-automate changes to PSD/PDF annotations?

August 14, 2006 5:30 PM

I've just finished making a few hundreds annotations to forty or so PSD files, and am quite ready to be done with them. However, being annotations, they all have my name at the top! Is there any way to batch-change this without going in and re-editing every one by hand? Save me from wasting countless non-billable hours fixing this manually!

I know that if I export the files to PDF the annotations are editable in Acrobat (or OS X preview), and Acrobat will allow me to change the "author" of the annotation, but I haven't found any way to do this on a batch level.

posted by tweebiscuit to computers & internet (8 comments total)

OK, I'm confused. PSD files? Photoshop files? How come they've got your name "at the top"? At the top where? More detail please?
posted by AmbroseChapel at 8:02 PM on August 14, 2006

I know nothing about Photoshop or the PSD format, but if it's acceptable to replace your name with some other name of the same length, or just a string of spaces of the same length, then I may be able you fix you up. Just send me one of the files (the smallest, preferably); email's in profile.

Can I ask why you'd consider this non-billable? (I gather you're a freelancer or contractor or such?) This sounds pretty billable to me. Everybody screws up and wastes a little bit of company time sometimes; that's part of the deal. Actively slacking off is one thing, but accidentally being a little ineffecient is perfectly fine, IMO.
posted by equalpants at 8:27 PM on August 14, 2006

uh, able to fix you up
posted by equalpants at 8:31 PM on August 14, 2006

Hey, thanks equalpants, I'll send one by.

And it's non-billable because this this contract isn't by the hour, it's for the job -- and on top of that, this specific fix is more of a "going the extra mile" task, which makes it tough to justify when compared against other work I could be doing.
posted by tweebiscuit at 11:15 PM on August 14, 2006

Ambrose -- yes, Photoshop files. By "at the top", I mean "at the top of the annotation", by which I mean "those little yellow boxes that the annotation tool creates." Basically, since annotation is mostly used for commenting on work you're going to send back, it always attaches your name to the note (similarly to Word's "track changes" feature), but since I'm using the tool for UI documentation, it's not really appropriate for my name to be all over a general UI spec.
posted by tweebiscuit at 11:16 PM on August 14, 2006

You may be screwed. In looking at the Adobe PDF guide for using javascript in Photoshop there seems to be no mention of selecting annotations. The overview guide's listing of the object model seems to show no options for getting to notes, which you'd need for a script to do it all and call with the batch processor.
posted by phearlez at 10:54 AM on August 15, 2006

That sucks -- yeah, the implementation seems pretty shoddy in both Photoshop and PDF. (Annoyingly, there's no other simple way to create a text box with an opaque background and a hairline in Photoshop, unless you do it using multiple layers, which was too much overhead for what i was doing, so I was stuck with the annotation tool.)
posted by tweebiscuit at 1:08 PM on August 15, 2006

I sent you something yesterday morning (11:20 PST); did you receive it? Google bounced my first attempt (didn't like the attachment), so I hope it didn't decide I was a spammer or something...
posted by equalpants at 4:59 PM on August 16, 2006