Is it possible to reference a photoshop file or layer comp from within another photoshop file?

Question

Creating all the art for a large website often involves a couple dozen 50+mb photoshop files. Frequently, a given module may appear in more than one file.

Is there a way to reference an oft-used module from another file?

For instance - "site-section-2.psd" references "common-module-h.psd", and "site-section-6.psd" also references "common-module-h.psd", so that any time updates are made to "common-module-h.psd", the updates appear in both files which reference it.

Possible?

(maybe with photoshop javascript?)

Answer 1

I've checked the JSX Photoshop Object Model, and you can access LayerComps, but there is no magic function to save from one file to another. Something like this could be written to disk, from file1.psd for example, then loaded into file2.psd.

It's a bit of a long shot and I don't know if it's worth the trouble.

For web prototyping I use Fireworks and and I'm pretty happy. You can easily create symbols (much like in Flash and Illustrator) and even save them to a Common Library, which means it will be easy peasy to keep your navigation items for example up to date, for all the files using it. You can even import PSD files into Fireworks, only not all the filters will be supported.

Don't know if you can keep most of the eye-candy in Photoshop and then assemble reamble versions with ease using Fireworks.