What's New

Snapshots That Always Arrive

When your AI assistant takes a picture of a page to check its work, that picture can be surprisingly large — especially for pages full of photos or rich detail. AI assistants put a limit on how much data a tool can hand them in one go, and a capture that exceeded it could be quietly discarded by the assistant: Sidekick delivered the picture, but the assistant never took it in, and would report seeing a placeholder instead of your page.

Sidekick now works within those limits: large captures are automatically compressed to a size every assistant accepts, keeping the text on the page crisp and readable. If you’ve ever had Claude (or any other AI assistant) claim it couldn’t see a page it had just captured, this update is for you — it applies automatically, with nothing to install.

Also New on the Site

A help article for the cryptic “_0x5971 is not defined” snapshot error, explaining which installs are affected and the one-time fresh install that fixes it. And the “Sidekick vs. InDesign’s Built-in AI Assistant” comparison has been brought up to date now that Adobe’s Firefly AI Assistant covers InDesign in public beta.

A Clearer Message When Sidekick Can’t Connect

If you opened the Sidekick panel before the Sidekick extension was installed in your AI Assistant, the panel used to say “The AI Assistant was closed. Reopen it to reconnect.” — confusing advice when nothing was ever connected and your AI Assistant was open the whole time.

The panel now says what’s actually going on: “Can’t reach your AI Assistant. Make sure it’s open and has the Sidekick extension installed.” The linked help page walks you through the two quick checks that fix it. This change lives in the InDesign plugin, so it arrives with your next update from Adobe Exchange.

Restarting Your AI Assistant, Properly

The help pages now spell out what “restart your AI Assistant” really means: fully quitting it, with steps for each platform. This matters most on Windows, where closing the Claude Desktop window quietly leaves it running in the system tray — so nothing actually restarts, and no update gets picked up.

Better Insight, Less Data

Sidekick now sends a few anonymous signals — when it starts, when it connects, when a snapshot is taken — so we can catch problems before you have to email us about them. At the same time we’ve tightened what we keep: IP addresses and location data are no longer stored with any telemetry, and the privacy policy has been updated to describe exactly what’s collected. Telemetry can be switched off anytime by asking your AI Assistant to “disable Sidekick telemetry”.

Also New on the Site

A help article for schools hitting Adobe Exchange’s “Plugins are unavailable for your user type” restriction on K-12 accounts, and a blog post on auditing alt text in your documents with Sidekick.

Windows Fix

Sidekick now starts reliably on Windows with Claude Desktop. If you installed recently and saw “Server disconnected” — or the panel sat on “Connecting…” and never got further — this release fixes it. Nothing was wrong with your connection or your setup: Sidekick downloaded everything correctly and then couldn’t find its own files again.

If you’re on Windows and hit this, reinstall the Sidekick extension in Claude Desktop once and you should be up and running. Sidekick will pick up where it left off without downloading anything again.

Automatic Updates on Windows

This one is bigger than it sounds. Sidekick updates itself in the background so you always have the latest version — except on Windows, where that had quietly never worked. Windows users have been running the version that shipped with their extension, missing every improvement since.

That’s fixed. Once you’re on this release, Windows gets the same automatic updates macOS has always had. You’ll also reclaim some disk space: old versions were piling up unnoticed, and Sidekick now tidies them away.

Installer Fix

Fixed an issue where the one-click installer (.mcpb) would fail with “Could not download Sidekick” on fresh installations or when the cache was cleared. The installer now correctly downloads the required files in all cases.

This release includes changes from 1.0.17 and 1.0.18 that were not previously available.

Smarter Object Snapshots

When you ask your AI assistant to capture a small object (smaller than about 3 inches), InDesign adds padding around it. Sidekick now automatically crops away this extra whitespace, giving you a clean, tight capture of just the object you wanted.

The snapshots are also compressed to stay within size limits, so you can capture more content in a single conversation.

Simpler Installation

Sidekick no longer requires native image processing libraries. This means:

• Faster, more reliable installation
• No platform-specific dependencies
• Works consistently across macOS and Windows

The connector now handles all image processing internally, so there’s nothing extra to install or configure.

See Snapshots Right in the Chat

When you ask Claude (or any other AI assistant) to show you how something looks in InDesign, the snapshot now appears as a full preview right in the conversation — fit it to width or zoom in to inspect the detail — instead of being tucked away inside a collapsed tool panel.

The snapshots Claude takes purely to check its own work stay quiet, so the chat doesn’t fill up with verification images — you only see the ones meant for you.

Sharper, More Accurate Object Snapshots

When Claude captures a single object to review it — for example to write alt text or confirm a change — that snapshot is now accurate even for trickier artwork:

• Rotated and transformed objects are captured exactly where they sit on the page, instead of from the wrong area.
• Objects on a background — like a cover sitting on a colored poster — now show that background through any gaps, rather than blank white.
• Overlapping elements are layered in the right order, so what Claude sees matches what’s actually on the page.

This makes Claude’s review of your layout more trustworthy, which is especially handy for systematic work like checking images one by one.

A Closer Look at Your Document

When Claude (or any other AI assistant) makes a change in InDesign, it likes to glance at the result. Until now that glance was a whole‑page view at a fairly coarse resolution — fine for confirming “the block moved,” but not “is this exactly right,” because the details that decide right are small.

Sidekick can now look much closer:

• Sharper full‑page views. Pages and spreads are rendered at the resolution a vision model can actually use, so fine type and the content inside image frames come through instead of blurring away.
• Zoom into any area. Claude can capture just part of a page at full detail — handy for reading a caption, a hairline rule, or whether the logo in the corner is the right one.
• Inspect a single object. Claude can look at one image or frame on its own — ideal for systematic work like checking or writing alt text image by image.
• Quick preview mode. A cheap, low‑resolution snapshot for fast “did the layout roughly change” checks when detail isn’t needed.

It all happens automatically — Claude chooses the right resolution for what it needs to see, and there’s no plugin update required.

Smoother Install in Safari

Downloading the Sidekick installer in Safari used to unpack it into a folder, which could trip up setup. It now downloads as a single file, so installation is one clean step.