Product Ideas

As a developer, I want to be able to treat shared images as individual images

At times, customers may apply redactions to documents that contain shared images. When PrizmDoc comes across these types of images, any affect done on one will be shown in all other occurrences of the shared image. So, if one image is redacted on one page, the shared images on other pages will get the same effect. This is for PrizmDoc to mimic the same behavior in Adobe Acrobat.

A customer is interested in being able to have each image get redacted separately of each other - regardless of whether they're shared images. Having this ability will allow them to have more control over exactly what content they intend to be redacted.

  • Howard Means
  • Jan 28 2020
  • Planned
  • Attach files
  • Mark Fears commented
    August 16, 2022 19:22

    This update is planned for Q1, 2023. This is our best estimate at this time. If that changes, I'll post an update to this request. Let me know if you have questions.

  • Misha Umnov commented
    February 07, 2022 09:07

    Hi all, just wanted to add one more use case where current behavior becomes a (big) problem.


    Over the past few years we had many of our customers raising this behavior as a blocker to their redaction workloads, forcing them to switch to an external product to perform redaction. By far the most popular case was whenever customers used PDFs created from PowerPoint presentations - typically those have a single background image with a corporate logo and some background for the rest of the space on a slide and that background image is reused across all of the slides/pages. Redacting text or area on one of the pages makes the rest of the file pretty much unusable as the burnt in redaction marks would get duplicated to all of the pages and obstruct the view for other information.
    I've attached some sample files (pptx, exported pdf and redaction output from PrizmDoc where I've only added rectangle redaction mark on first page) to provide some more context.


    Also I understand that current behavior is consistent with Adobe Acrobat, however if you face this problem in Adobe Acrobat you can utilize its "Optimize PDF → Optimize scanned pages" feature for a workaround to 'denormalize' the images (effectively creates copies of the same image everywhere it's used) at the expense of file size. Any change we could get something similar available in PrizmDoc as ContentConversion destination, or maybe have it as a setting for MarkupBurner, or even Mark itself?


    Thanks for reading.

  • Reuben Bluff commented
    March 03, 2021 01:26

    The description mentions that "this is for PrizmDoc to mimic the same behavior in Adobe Acrobat". I attempted to confirm this by observing the behaviour of Adobe Acrobat.

    I determined that, after drawing a redaction box over the shared image using Acrobat, all instances of the shared image on all pages are redacted. However, when an entire page containing the shared image is redacted in Acrobat, the instances of the shared image on other pages are not redacted. I would say that the behaviour of Acrobat is in line with what I would intuitively expect as a user.

    I would argue that, since the behaviour of the PrizmDoc viewer does not mimic the behaviour of Acrobat, then this could be viewed as a bug.

    Please find attached the original PDF, the PDF with a redaction box over the shared image, and the PDF with the entire first page redacted.

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