Custom XMP Panel with "pulldowns" in Bridge

Report · Jul 16, 2009

Hello,

I have a custom XMP panel built that is visible in Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, which is nice.

I can view this custom XMP panel in Bridge as well, however the fields with pulldown menus don't show in Bridge. Being able to use pulldowns is critical for our workflow...AND I want people to be able to use Bridge for metadata entry. Does anyone have a solution for this?

I want fields with pulldowns in my custom XMP panel to be viewable and editable in Bridge. Help!!

Thanks

Rob

Report · Jul 24, 2009

Bridge's metadata panel only supports plain-text fields for custom metadata. See the following article on how to submit and feature request to Adobe via the feature request form:

http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/800/e8008c68.html

I assume you already know that you can open the File Info dialog itself directly within Bridge for a selection of one or more files, yes? The same custom File Info panel that appears in Photoshop's File Info panel will appear in Bridge. To open File Info in Bridge, use the File or thumbnail-contextual menus or the keyboard shortcut Cmd+Opt+Shift+I.

If you really require a highly customized metadata UI right inside the Bridge window (File Info is a modal dialog box), and you are willing to invest some coding effort, then I suggest using Flex Builder to create a custom Flash Panel for Bridge. You will have to take on some non-trivial work to sync up what's displayed/edited in your custom panel with the current selection of Thumbnails, etc., but such a solution should be technically possible. The Bridge Scripting SDK includes example for how to add a Flash panel, how to get your Flash ActionScript and Bridge JavaScript to talk to each other via the Flash External Interface, and how to use the XMPScript API to modify metadata for files. Again, I think the effort required is non-rivial, but Bridge does provide a platform upon which you can build a highly customized solution.

-David