P: Full size photo shown on my secondary monitor. Can you stop it dissapearing every time the focus moves to something else?

I have a three monitor ‘Windows’ setup. I want lightroom / photoshop on monitor 2, the photo full size on the secondary display on monitor 1. Monitor 3 is used as general purpose, often showing ChatGPT as I edit. I cannot get the full size photo on monitor 1 to stay there if I start typing on monitor 3. It goes blank.

A good answer about the issue was received from Conrad C in the forum, as below.

This isn’t a technically verified or official answer, but just from experience, I am not sure this is solvable unless Adobe makes some changes to the code. To me, the Secondary Display window appears to be  a floating “palette” or “panel” in the same way as panels in other applications. The problem with that is, in most other software that I’ve used, panel-type windows appear only when that application is the active/foreground application. Switching to another application hides all of the first application’s panels, even though the main application window stays visible.

In Lightroom Classic the Secondary Display window has a very thin title bar, the same kind used in floating panels. Not the full height title bar used in application windows. That’s why I think it works like a panel, not a window.

I’m guessing you see the same behavior in Photoshop, where any floating panel (not docked to the main application window) also disappears when switching to another application. It’s worked that way for literally decades, as it has in other Adobe software.

Not sure which OS you’re using, but everything described above is consistent with how floating panels are defined on macOS. In non-Adobe applications and Apple’s own, the same thing happens if panels are undocked and floating; switch to another application and floating panels are immediately hidden.

If I’m right about all that, then the way to get this changed is to submit a feature request in the Feature Requests section so it can get voted up, and if Adobe decides to work on it they assign a Status to it. It might be enough to ask Adobe to change the window type of Secondary Display from panel to window, but I’m not a programmer so maybe there is more involved than that.  But who knows, maybe they’ll find it simple enough to make it an option.

Keep in mind that changing this will involve changing something that has been coded that way for 19 years (Lightroom Classic) and over 36 years (Photoshop). That doesn’t mean it can’t be changed, but the current behavior is considered extremely traditional at this point in history.

Personally I think it would be nicer if the Secondary Display stayed visible on application switch, so it’s a good idea.