Replace and Reconnect a PSD file in After Effects

Posted on Sunday, 28 July 2013

Replace and Reconnect a PSD file in After Effects – a trick that works

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Replace and Reconnect a .PSD File in AE

One common problem when working in After Effects is when you want to Replace and Reconnect a PSD file in After Effects in a Project, but you don’t want to change the original file because it is used in that location in another project. You cannot simply make a copy and name the same because there is not a function in AE to point to another PS file. Since there can be hundreds of layers in the PSD file, having to relink each layer is not a feasible option.

Relink psd files in after effects – How to do it: Here is a trick:

To Relink PSD files in after effects, create an empty folder for example called ‘temp’ in the folder where the existing PSD file is located. Then temporarily move the PSD file into that folder (thus hiding it for AE).

You can now go ahead and make a copy of the PSD file and put in another location where you wish to store the new PSD that you want to work with / change / edit.

Then when you re-open the new project, the file will be missing for all of the layers of the PSD file.

Double-click a layer of the missing file in the Project panel, AE will then ask you to locate the missing file. You simply point it to the new PSD file’s matching layer and instead of having to manually re-link each layer, all layers should reconnect automatically!

(Please note that any new PSD layers that were not imported originally will not be imported, you will need to do that manually.)

Remember to the move the original PSD file back out from its temporary location so that your other project(s) can find it.

There are scripts to batch process XML files and so on, but for simply re-linking single PSD files, this is an easy method that doesn’t require any scripts or batch processing!

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