2007.07.26 17:54 "Re: [Tiff] Re: Writing custom TIFF tags to Photoshop saving TIFFs(withPhotoshop)", by Chris Cox

Currently you cannot tag individual layers with metadata -- there is no good guarantee on layer identity, or any metadata associated with each layer.

The workaround most commonly used is to rely on layer naming. But you are correct in that users can give multiple layers the same name, or rearrange layers as they please.

There are unique per document layer IDs associated with each layer, but I'm not sure how easily you can extract that from the layer data. If you can do that, then you have a unique mapping of the layers that you can use for metadata. But that still won't solve the problem of deleted or new layers.

An automation plugin might work (or at least help), but I'm not positive (I haven't tried to do this myself).

Yes, I see a need for per-layer metadata. Now someone has to convince my product management that it's a priority...

Chris

On 7/26/07 7:11 AM, "Olumide" <50295@web.de> wrote:

If you want metadata to be preserved - put it in a documented metadata format: EXIF (but only documented tags), IPTC, or XMP.

Photoshop throws away undocumented tags for a reason: they cause big problems when they get out of sync with the image data.

Just be sure, are you saying that I can get Photoshop to save custom data as XMP? -- in which case, I should be reading this: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/xmp/ :)

Also, how would you suggest that I go about "tagging" each layer of the images produced in Photoshop? As I said in my previous post, I need the layers to have specific IDs (preferably numerical), and layer names just wont do because Photoshop allows layers to have the same name, and typos in during naming will produce unique but unrecognizable names -- if they contain typos.

What sort of plugin would I need to write to do this? I'd like the plugin to be able to check if a layer ID has already been assigned, to avoid ID collisions.