Allow selection tools to approach the edge of an image without snapping to the edge

Forum|Forum|20 hours ago
October 10, 2026
11 replies
49 views

Please allow selection tools such as crop and marquis to approach arbitrarily close to the edge of an image without automatically snapping to the edge whenever the user gets close to it. It’s annoying to have to zoom way in to be able to place the edge of the crop mask near, but not on, the edge of the image.

Trevor.Dennis

Community Expert

BTW I made the ruler more visible by lightening the UI with Shift Ctrl F2, Shift Ctrl F1 darkens it. Jane taught me that trick a while back. :-)

I

innovative_Phoenix6a65Author

Participating Frequently

To clarify, I am working in PS Elements, not PS proper, so some or all of the advice below doesn’t apply to my situation. For example, my menu has only Snap To, not a separate Snap option as well. I haven’t turned Snapping on; it was turned on by default and I’ve been doing battle with it ever since.

I didn’t know PSe had its own forum when I first posted this--who knew?--but I have learned the error of my ways and I have since located and posted on the PSe forum so as not to bother PS users unnecessarily.

Trevor.Dennis

Community Expert

You can usually hold down the Ctrl/Cmd key to temporarily disabler snapping. You sometimes have to hold down the space bar at the same time if it is a corner situation. Works in most situations. Snapping is for to useful to actually turn off.

Another trick you can use is to move the Grid zero, zero position.

Drag out a pair of guides to mark the position you want to use as reference, and with rulers turned on (Ctrl R) drag from the rulers corner top left, to the guides. This becomes the new zero, zero position.

The rectangle is on a new layer. I use Ctrl T to start Free Transform, and the reference defaults to the centre of that layer. But if I reposition the reference on the 3X3 array to the left of the X: field (my magenta reference), the layer reference is moved to thew same location, and I can use the x: and y: fields to get a perfect position. In this case it snapped to x: 1.00px, y:1.00px and that’s because the perfect position falls on a half pixel. There is not a pixel in the dead centre of a document with an even number of pixels on both sides.

I

innovative_Phoenix6a65Author

Participating Frequently

Thanks again for the tip. Is there a way to make non-snapping my default, or do I have to reset it for every image I open? That appears to be the case right now--certainly better than nothing, but not entirely satisfactory.

D Fosse

Community Expert

These are sticky settings, until you change them again. If you have to set it for every image something’s wrong.

I’ve had snapping to document bounds and layers disabled for years and never had to touch them. The others I sometimes change, but they always stick until next change.

I

innovative_Phoenix6a65Author

Participating Frequently

Thanks, didn’t know that option was there. As with most troublesome “forget what you want, we know better” options, it should be opt-in rather than opt-out.

Trevor.Dennis

Community Expert

@innovative_Phoenix6a65 it should be opt-in rather than opt-out.

The problem with that is that you have turned Snapping on, so the default needs to be to snap. I guess it might useful if you have Snapping turned off and momentarily enabled it with a modifier key. It’s an easy thing to remember because when you move an object or selection or crop near to a guide or document bound and it snaps, it’s going to jog your memory that you have the option. I’m really old and can’t remember my name half the time, but I honestly don’t have any problems remembering those shortcuts along with a spring-loaded shortcuts which are super useful and modifiers to change behaviour.

Do you know you can save custom shortcuts with custom workspaces? Swap to a different workspace and have a whole different Photoshop to play with.

D Fosse

Community Expert

Turn off snapping in the View menu:

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