How do I edit Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop documents in SharePoint/MetaShare?

Method 1 – Download the document, open it in the client application and upload a new version

The good thing with this method it that the procedure is simple but the drawback is that it requires a few steps:

  1. Download the document
  2. Open the downloaded document in Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop.
  3. Edit the document and save your changes.
  4. Upload the edited document to the same workspace from where you downloaded the document. A recommendation is to filter on all the metadata values that the document was tagged with, by clicking on all its metadata values in the document view. This way you do not need to fill in the document form again. As the document already exists in the workspace you need to click on the “Add version” button, when being prompted that there is a file-name conflict:
    MetaShare's file-name conflict warning
  5. In MetaShare you will now see that the document’s version has been incremented with one version.

Method 2 – Open the document from File Explorer, edit it and save it

This method requires access to your documents from the File Explorer.

The recommended file access is through OneDrive, as the documents’ version history will then be intact. If you access the documents through a network location or a mapped drive, the documents’ previous version history will be lost (when saving an edited document, the earlier version will first be moved to the recycle bin and the newly saved document will therefore not have any metadata).

  1. Open the document from your File Explorer or open your Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop application and click on “Open” on the left side of the application, which will open the File Explorer.
    In Adobe Illustrator:
    Open a SharePoint document from Adobe Illustrator
    In Adobe Photoshop:
    Open a SharePoint document from Adobe Photoshop
  2. Edit the document and save your changes.
  3. If you accessed the document through OneDrive, the document’s version has been incremented with one version. If you accessed the document through a mapped drive or a network location, the document’s version history will be lost.