Hi Folks,
We have been experiencing an issue with XMP data in Photoshop PSD files getting massively bloated with apparently-meaningless hexadecimal identifiers nested within the <photoshop:DocumentAncestors> element.
Here's a small sample from a file that has more than 5,000 lines of these meaningless identifiers:
<photoshop:DocumentAncestors>
<rdf:Bag>
<rdf:li>0</rdf:li>
<rdf:li>001BB25216B21DFC0F44C7B92B77F5FA</rdf:li>
<rdf:li>004CE4C145A3CE957E56A1042C9F3F48</rdf:li>
<rdf:li>adobe:docid:photoshop:291c5993-567a-11dd-a24e-ceb136142d07</rdf:li>
<rdf:li>adobe:docid:photoshop:2bbf02c2-5430-11da-b623-a3b827a37ef2</rdf:li>
<rdf:li>uuid:1E81F1F54BF9DD1189B9A996D9DE145A</rdf:li>
<rdf:li>uuid:1F24E86EE16D11E09043FD4EBC0F15F3</rdf:li>
<rdf:li>xmp.did:2943E538B0A0DF119BACE526F12A15B2</rdf:li>
<rdf:li>xmp.did:29825C5F7F2168118083D40009F3A303</rdf:li>
This is problematic because it often causes XMP write operations to fail because of insufficient space in the target file's XMP packet (especially when converting to other file formats with fixed-size headers, e.g. JPG.
I read somewhere that these identifiers are captured every time a copy & paste operation is performed on the image -- but it's hard to believe that more than 5,000 operations occurred!
It's possible to remove all photoshop metadata from a file using ExifTool GUI -- but that's not really a very scalable solution!
Does anyone know what causes this XMP metadata bloating, or more importantly, how to prevent it?
Thanks in advance for any assistance,
Tony Gill