I lost all of my image layers after cropping

Question

So I have a tall and skinny project file made up of multiple text and image layers. I cropped it down to one small section, to export that area as a jpeg, but then when I dragged the crop back out to the original canvas size, all but 2 of my image layers no longer appeared. The text layers appear fine, but the images don't display. I've tried selecting one of those image layers and selecting "quick export as PNG", but I get the error message "The selection cannot be exported because it is empty."

Stupidly, I saved this file to the original file location instead of a new file, so I don't have an older version to go back to.

I've uninstalled and reinstalled Photoshop, I've done edit>purge>all, I've played with the opacity of layers, and I'm kind of at my wits end at this point.

I'm on a Mac, using Photoshop 20.0.2.

davescm · Accepted Answer

It sounds like you've made a couple of mistakes:

1. It appears you have cropped with "Delete cropped pixels" set in the options bar. That would have been OK if you had then stepped back in history (using the history panel) rather than dragging the crop back out.

2. Having made mistake number 1 you have saved over the original. When working on important files , make incremental saves i.e. filename001.psd , filename002.psd etc. You can always delete the interim versions later.

Unfortunately, if you have no back up version then there is nothing you can do.

Incidentally , if you saved using the new cloud document format, then you would be able to step back to an earlier version as that does keep increments automatically. But when saving locally - incremental is the way to go.

Dave

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