Inspiring

Answered

Find placed objects

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
October 18, 2022
2 replies
1226 views

I have a layout in InDesign where the designer, instead of linking to art files, copied the objects and pasted them into the layout. They're now "placed objects" in the Layers panel.

I need to find them all.

I can go through the links in the Links panel, but they're not in there. I can expand all the layers in the Layers panel, and hope I catch them in the list, but this is only spread by spread. I've tried the Find > Object, but there's no associated object style to search for.

Is there an easy way to do this without writing javascript?

Thanks in advance.

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Correct answer rob day

Hi @aniri5j9ox8tw2ln , One thing to be aware of when creating links from pasted items via JavaScript, is the quality of the pasted item might depend on the OS. The Mac OS clipboard items are high quality PDFs, so when you paste, all of the original qualities are included—resolution, color mode, embedded color profiles. On other OSs the pasted object might be a low res image format and you can no longer get at the original quality.

If you are working on a Mac you can get at the high quality clipboard object via AppleScript. This AppleScript links pasted objects as PDFs with full resolution and color properties:

https://shared-assets.adobe.com/link/76c4e50a-97fd-4fcf-7bba-6638f982846a

aniri5j9ox8tw2ln

Legend

This is asked very often, there are custom scripts for this problem that can help.
I have this one in use:

https://creativepro.com/files/kahrel/indesign/unembed_images.html

rob day

Correct answer

Community Expert

Hi @aniri5j9ox8tw2ln , One thing to be aware of when creating links from pasted items via JavaScript, is the quality of the pasted item might depend on the OS. The Mac OS clipboard items are high quality PDFs, so when you paste, all of the original qualities are included—resolution, color mode, embedded color profiles. On other OSs the pasted object might be a low res image format and you can no longer get at the original quality.

If you are working on a Mac you can get at the high quality clipboard object via AppleScript. This AppleScript links pasted objects as PDFs with full resolution and color properties:

https://shared-assets.adobe.com/link/76c4e50a-97fd-4fcf-7bba-6638f982846a

aniri5j9ox8tw2ln

Legend

Hi and thanks for the information, I work on a mac.

BobLevine

Community Expert

That's pretty poor practice, so much so that I didn't even know how they would show in the layers panel. So, I just tried it with something I drew in Word and it came in as "pasted graphic" not "placed object."

I know that's not an answer but maybe some kind of clue? Can you post the file somewhere?

D

David Cardillo, PRHAuthor

Inspiring

Oh, it's absolutely wrong - which is why I need to find them all.

I'm not able to share the file. But as you've just seen, it's pretty easy to recreate a similar file.

Right now I'm looking at going through the Links panel and _deleting_ every link, one by one (there's a couple hundred). Any remaining art is therefore placed. Tedious, yes, but will take me less time than trying to cobble together a script to find them.

– dc

BobLevine

Community Expert

What if you made a copy of the file and deleted all of the real links leaving only the pasted ones and used that as a guide?

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