InDesign Page Count ( PageImagePageNumber )

[Stephen Marsh]

ExifTool is returning the following result for Adobe InDesign files (.indd) that contain more than 2 pages:

[XMP-xmp] PageImagePageNumber: 1, 2

Files consisting of 1 to 2 pages are correctly reported.

Bug? Limitation? Error in the source file?

I have tested with files generated by CS6 and CC2018 with the same result.

[Phil Harvey]

You can take a look at the raw XMP stored in the file:

exiftool -xmp -b FILE

There must be two PageInfo structures, with PageNumber's 1 and 2.

- Phil

[Stephen Marsh]

Thanks Phil, I can share test files if you like. These are simply new documents created from the new document command, with no page content - only a test of total document pages to explore getting the total page count metadata from a given file. In all cases, only 2 pages are being shown, whether the file has 3, 4, 128 pages etc.

[Phil Harvey]

I don't think there is any need to see the files.  I'm pretty sure that ExifTool is just reporting the metadata stored in the file.  Of course, InDesign can write anything it wants.

- Phil

[Stephen Marsh]

Thanks Phil, I have logged the issue with Adobe. I can only test as far back as CS6 and the issue persists with CC2018. As this appears to be reported exactly the same in Adobe Bridge I believe that you are correct in suggesting that this is being incorrectly set at the source.

[Stephen Marsh]

It appears that I was looking at the page preview thumbnails - which defaults to 2 pages as an application preference and can be changed for all pages if desired... However as demonstrated by this topic thread – one can't reliably use this feature to find out how many pages the file actually has.