Filters, Search & Edge Cases

Candidate Set Filters

Picky builds a candidate set from layers in the active composition. These filters determine which layers are eligible:

Locked Layers

Locked layers are excluded by default. Turn on the Locked toggle in the top bar to include them.

Shy Layers

Behavior depends on the composition state:

• If the comp is hiding shy layers and Include Shy is off, shy layers are excluded.
• If Include Shy is on, shy layers stay eligible regardless of comp state.

Visibility Scope

Picky runs with a visible-layer scope. Disabled (hidden) layers are not part of the candidate set.

The exception is Matte, which checks all layers so track matte layers can be found even when After Effects hides them.

Actions That Require an Existing Selection

These commands fail with an error if nothing is selected first:

• Same As Active needs a selected layer to read its type.
• Children needs selected parent layers to find their children.
• Siblings needs a selected layer to find layers sharing its parent.

Picky shows an error toast instead of guessing.

Name Search

Name Search opens a modal where you type a word and choose Source or Layer as the match target.

• The search is case-insensitive and a partial match is enough.
• Source matches the source asset name. This is useful for precomps, solids, and footage-backed layers.
• Layer matches the layer name in the timeline. This is better when your naming convention matters more than the source.

The Select button respects held modifiers, so you can Shift-click to add name matches to the current selection.

Recognized Layer Types

Picky recognizes these built-in types directly:

Anything else falls into an internal other bucket and is not exposed as a user-facing selector.

Every Nth Limits

The Every Nth value is clamped to 2–99. If a value outside that range is provided, Picky normalizes it silently instead of throwing an error.