Extract metadata (title, description) from .psd file?

[ben_taylor_85993088]

Hi,

I'm after some method of reading metadata information (specifically title, description, but what would be really good would be edit history as well) from a .psd file.

I've seen this documentation https://developer.adobe.com/firefly-services/docs/photoshop/api/

which seems like it might be along the lines of what I want - but it seems to be for a file in the cloud, whereas I want something that will work on a local file.

There's also this: https://github.com/webtoon/psd which works locally and it gets _some_ information from the file, but doesn't seem to include the metadata like title, description, and edit history.

Is there anything close to what I'm after available?

[Stephen Marsh]

@ben_taylor_85993088 

Photoshop or Bridge scripting is the "obvious" choice, as is ExifTool (a third party command line interface utility).

https://prepression.blogspot.com/2016/08/extracting-metadata-to-csv.html

What do you need to do with this data? What format? Is this only for a single image or for multiple images?

[ben_taylor_85993088]

Oh I didn't realise exiftool worked with it. That's helpful, thanks.

It's basically for a utility I want to write to sync .psd files to/from a remote machine, so it will tell me about the image it's going to copy.

Yes I know Lightroom CC does the syncing bit, but I'm fed up of how it's not designed to work with photoshop, like for instance how when I (accidentally) make edits it wipes out the photoshop layers. I made a previous post about this and got the response that yes it does actually save them somewhere but I have to go looking for them and end up with lots of copies of the same file. I want to be able to see .psd files that I can choose them name of, then I know where I am with them and which is the correct version.

Creative Cloud / Photoshop 'save to cloud' would work but I have to save each one individually, or if I try to add them as a batch to creative cloud desktop, it will only do 10 at once.

OneDrive/other cloud file sharing service would work but it's just too slow.

Use case/background, is that I have one machine (a mac laptop) that can read and write sd cards and external drives, but that only has a small screen, and another (windows) that isn't allowed to access external drives (but can access networks, including my mac laptop directly) and that has  large monitors.

Yes, why don't you unplug the monitors and plug them into your mac laptop I hear you say: can't be bothered to keep reaching under the desk and faffing with wires.

I've wondered about a NAS drive, but that might suffer the same lack of ability to be written to from my windows machine as an SD card/external HD would.

Any other suggestion gratefully appreciated.

[ExUSA]

To sync files, use a dedicated utility. FreeFileSync is cross-platform, working on the Mac, there are a number of good apps available (ChronoSync, SuperDuper, Carbon Copy Cloner among others.)

You can use EXIFTool to extract metadata and it is licensed to distribute with software if needed. I'd probably go that route.

exiftool.org

[ben_taylor_85993088]

anything that advertises itself as Free in the title, probably isn't 🙂 

[ExUSA]

FreeFileSync is licensed under the GPL, free for non-commercial use.

[ben_taylor_85993088]

thanks, though - I will check it out

[ExUSA]

Just use EXIFTool for this.

[Stephen Marsh]

Adobe Bridge can view all this metadata in different areas and also copy or move files, all without scripting or custom programming alternative tools.. So I'd start there before reinventing the wheel.

[ben_taylor_85993088]

do you know of any command line examples for bridge please?

[ExUSA]

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/mg817g9a9ymbasi/AADTmXUVxmFfM58bcyYE7yiwa?dl=0

This includes scripts to use EXIFTool within Bridge and Photoshop.

And check the prepression link above, Stephen has a lot of script examples there.