Replace Keynote graphics in the Finder

Jan 21, '03 10:15:41AM

Contributed by: ateles

I am using Keynote a lot, but I mostly import PDF and JPEGS that I create using other apps. Sometimes I am not happy with the way the graph looks in keynote, so I go change it and place it again. But I found another easier way of doing this. First of all, notice that a Keynote presentation is really folder containing many objects, including the files you have placed in it. For example, I have a presentation called "fish.key;" using the Terminal, type:

 % cd /folder/with/presentation
% cd fish.key
% ls
You will see a bunch of things including your own imported graphic files. If you, for some reason, change one of those, all you have to do is place a new copy of the file in the presentation folder (close Keynote first) using cp:
 % cp anyfile.jpg ~/Documents/fish.key/
Launch Keynote and open your presentation and the new version of your graphic file while be in the expected slide.

[Editor's note: If you've changed the size or shape of the graphic, then you'll probably need to open Keynote anyway to position it ... so I'll probably stick to updating graphics within the program! However, this opens some intriguing possibilities for scripting modifications to presentations -- imagine a daily sales graph that gets updated by running a cron script to copy and paste the JPEG into the Keynote folder each night, or something similar...]

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