PS v26.7 See the individual steps within an Action

The reply from ​@Conrad_C in the other topic is here:

One thing that needs some attention in the “new” actions panel is editing an action that plays one or more other actions.

You can only see the actual action and not the other actions steps that it plays which makes a very difficult to diagnose which step in which action might be causing an issue.

Whereas in Classic Action mode you can see all the actions and when played in step by step mode see the complete process and that is not possible as far as i can tell in the “new” actions panel.

The reason they changed it is that It’s better…it saves steps. When you want to run an action the old way, you either have to select the action and then click the Play button, or to run an action in one click you had to switch it into Button mode. Now, you only have to click the action (no need to double-click). Just one step.

But the important thing to understand is that nothing was lost. You don’t need to switch it to Classic mode. Playing back, editing an action and its steps, etc. are all possible from the default Actions panel view. It only takes one click to edit an action (hover over action, click the gear icon).

Or have you noticed that there’s something that works worse than before?

It should all be there and discoverable, as you can see in the demo below. There should not be any need to go back to Classic mode. First, your actions are in the Yours section. If you already have the actions list set to Yours, then all you have to do is hover the pointer over the action and you will see a gear and an ellipsis (…) menu. This gives you not one, but two ways to switch into editing mode: Either click the gear icon to go directly into Edit Action mode, or choose Edit Action from the ellipsis menu; they do the same thing.

Again, as you see in the demo below, once you’re in editing mode, all of the options that were in previous versions of Photoshop, such as editing or inserting steps, should be available. The action steps are listed below the action options, so to see the steps on a smaller display you might have to scroll down the Actions panel. You can expand any step to see and edit the same step details you saw in earlier versions of Photoshop; again, the editing options for a step appear when you hover the pointer over that step. When you’re done editing, click the back button at the top to back out to the list of actions.

If you prefer using context menus (a.k.a. right-clicking) instead of looking for buttons, you can right-click an action or step to see the editing options menu.

I personally think the improvements are great, editing is more straightforward, there is no more need to tediously switch in and out of Button mode like we used to, and there are new features like being able to add an icon and description. Overall I think they did a great job modernizing Actions.

​@jane-e Ah, I thought they’d fixed that now.

​@megand64229350 Let’s see what happens then. If nothing happens in a few days, give a shout here. Then this can be locked and you can repost in Feature Requests. I think a simple copy-paste will do fine, it’s pretty clear what the request is.

There is, revert to “classic actions” from the fly-out menu.

With the new menu, you can click the gear icon to get the individual steps and edit them. But you’re right, there doesn’t seem to be a way to start the action from a random step. That’s an obvious feature request.

This is all part of the “Modern User Interface” that they’re rolling out piece by piece now. Much of it has been rather buggy on release, then fixed, so they seem to be paying attention. I suggest this be moved to Feature Requests.

​@Iwan24905747x70q 

Switch to Classic Actions:

Had something similar happen before - usually it’s the action recording getting slightly corrupted or out of sync. Try recreating the action from scratch and see if it behaves normally. Also check if any steps depend on specific layer names or selections, because that can break easily. Resetting preferences can help too if things started acting weird all of a sudden.

Adobe, why? First, you changed the gradient tool, and now only the classic gradient tool is usable (for applying multiple gradients sequentially). And now it's the actions' turn. Directly clicking on the actions triggers them immediately. What?! And yet another tool in Photoshop that has to be switched to classic mode. Any suggestions?