Where’s Waldo...used?

[BartonGarrett256]

I built a short the other day that had about fifty comps.  Now I can’t find one of them and don’t want to rebuild it.  The recent comps list is pretty useless as once you start looking through old ones the oldest get dropped, and the list q becomes a donkey’s breakfast.  I’d like to see the last fifty, or better yet, as for me it’s usually easy to find the assets I used to build them, what I’d really like to see is a way to search all my Ae comps on one drive or folder for a specific asset- if the asset is in a comp identify it. 

I’ve no interest in a lecture about how to structure my workflow, just wonder if anyone made a plug-in to do this or there is another way to get there. I looked around Ae Scripts and didn’t find anything.   In Pr they have a nice feature that shows me where things were used, but in Ae I tend to have many more sub-projects, so I need to be more global.  Thanks

[Kyle Hamrick]

It seems like you might be mixing up terms, which is making your question/request unclear.

Are you saying that you don't remember where you saved a project on your hard drive? I mean this in the nicest way possible, but that's in no way Adobe's fault. You can use the search feature of your OS to find something matching the name you used when saving the file. If you don't remember that name, I'm not sure how we (let alone a third-party plug-in/script) could help you.

If you're saying that you can't find a particular composition in a project with many compositions - there's a search bar at the top of the project panel.

There are indeed several ways to navigate within an AE project to see what assets and compositions are used where, but the actual, long-term answer is to organize your projects and files in a way that allows you to find things later.

[BartonGarrett256]

Thanks for responding. 

Here’s an example.  I’m building a short, and want to use, within it, one comp I built a few weeks or months ago, but that old comp could be in many places.  I don’t recall its name, but I know I used a specific image within the comp, and that image is easy to find in Lr, I know its name, it is unique.  I want to search for the old comp in the drive I keep all my Ae work in, using just that image (the one I know is in it) name. I want to see a list of somethings, ideally comps, sorted by date, that contain that image. I could probably do that in the Windows Search Everything utility, but I can’t imagine I’m the first stupid/lazy/unorganized Ae user to want to do this, knowing how totally organized artistic people typically are.

Many moons ago I managed employees who had direct contact with customers, and one or two of those misbegotten souls occasionally would whine about “stupid customers doing idiotic things”.   I would ask them to play a game I called “Who’s the customer?”.  It was easy, in any transaction the customer is the person giving the other person money.

Our job, I would explain to those waifs, was, when we are not the customer, is not to point out how stupid something they were doing was, but to set up the system so the people giving us their money couldn’t do stupid things or if they did they wouldn’t notice, and then they would be, perhaps not happy, but at least less dissatisfied. Then they would always come back and give us more of their money, that way we could feed our children. Getting new customers is expensive, I’ve found it better to keep the ones you have.

[Kyle Hamrick]

You may also have noticed that you're talking to another user, not an Adobe employee. If this is a feature you'd like implemented (which possibly sounds more OS-level than what a developer like Adobe could do, but I'm not a developer), you can make feature requests here: After Effects: Hot (1794 ideas) – Adobe video & audio apps
Your anecdote is charmingly written, but some things just can't do everything for you. I'd love for my car to drive itself, personally.

If you know the specific, discrete filename used in the project in question, it's probable that you could develop a script that would search for every .aep on the drive(s) you directed it to, then open them, one by one, to see if said file is contained within. I'm not aware of such a script existing, but it seems technically possible.

If it were me, I'd do a manual search for all the .aep files on your drive and look through them. You'll inevitably be able to eliminate most of them by the project name. When you find the correct one, rename it and place it with the other related files for this project.