Revisions to PDFs in Adobe Acrobat Pro wiping out Finder (and DT3) tags

Seemingly out of nowhere (or maybe I wasn’t paying close enough attention previously), it appears that Adobe Acrobat Pro 2020 is wiping out Finder tags upon saving PDFs, and by extension, killing my ability to find these items within DT3 based on their tags.

I have a database that indexes a folder structure of a few thousand PDFs, all of which are tagged so that they can be easily isolated into categories based on subject matter, citation, jurisdiction, etc. I have had some issues with annotating PDFs recently (e.g., highlighting text causing the record type to be changed from “PDF+text” to “PDF document”) so I have started applying annotations externally, first in Skim but now in Adobe Acrobat Pro since I bit the bullet and purchased it. This doesn’t seem to be happening when I annotate a PDF in Skim and I don’t know whether this would happen if I were using Adobe Acrobat DC.

Has anyone else seen this issue?

Notably, this also happens if I apply my tags in Finder then open the PDF in Acrobat, annotate, and save.

Do you see the same behavior when editing and saving in Preview?

No, this doesn’t happen in Preview. And interestingly, I have realized that it only happens with Acrobat Pro 2020 when deleting an annotation from a PDF. Adding highlights, for example, to a PDF in Acrobat Pro 2020 doesn’t impact Finder tags. I’m assuming this means the cause here is Adobe rather than an issue with DT3/PDFkit?

I can confirm that behaviour. I duplicated a PDF in my inbox, then:

  • from the context menu in DT selected “Show in Finder”
  • in Finder selected the “Orange” tag in the context menu
    – Finder now shows this PDF with an orange tag
  • from the context menu in DT opened the PDF in Adobe Acrobat Pro DC (20.12.20048.400142)
  • added a “Sticky Note” to the PDF in Acrobat
  • saved the PDF (in its location in DT using the “Save File” disk-icon)
  • from the context menu in DT selected “Show in Finder”
    – Finder still shows this PDF with an orange tag
  • from the context menu in DT opened the PDF in Adobe Acrobat Pro DC
  • selected and deleted the “Sticky Note”
  • saved the PDF (in its location in DT using the “Save File” disk-icon)
  • from the context menu in DT selected “Show in Finder”
    – Finder no longer shows an orange tag on this PDF

And I’ve just confirmed that - as expected - this behaviour is completely independent of DT.

[macOS Catalina 10.15.7 (19H2)]

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