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TheWayISeeThings
TheWayISeeThings
Participating Frequently
July 10, 2021
Question

Looking for lost palettes and actions

  • July 10, 2021
  • 2 replies
  • 447 views

My prior desktop running Win 10 Pro failed last week and I opted to build a new desktop rather than trying to repair 10 year old hardware.  I opted for a Windows Home perpetual over the Win 7 Pro OEM (upgraded to 10) that I ran in my prior build. 

 

I was able to locate and copy over my PS 2021 roaming settings.  While patterns came back, actions and my custom palette groups did not.  My downloaded/installed palettes such as Ben Moore palette libraries did come back, but the custome palette groups I created did not.  I did not export my custom palettes at any time.  Is there any way to get them back?  

 

Similar story with actions; however, I'm not aware of a way to export actions.  As far as I know, when you create them they should be saved locally.  

 

 

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

Stephen Marsh
Community Expert
Stephen MarshCommunity Expert
Community Expert
July 11, 2021

 

Ideally you have been saving action sets from the action panel to a .atn file and would have these backed-up.

 

Unsaved actions are temporarily stored in the Actions Palette.psp file:

 

Mac OS example:

/Users/username/Library/Preferences/Adobe Photoshop CC 2019 Settings⁩/Actions Palette.psp

 

Win OS example:

C:\Users\username\appData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop 2020\Adobe Photoshop 2020 Settings\Actions Palette.psp

 

You may or may not be able to recover actions if you can find and copy this file to the new system.

 

I created a script to open various files to manually create a backup. As it is run from the current installation/version of Photoshop, it will not be of much help to you. If you have access to the previous file system in a backup, then you could look for your old data in the following directory paths. Replace username with your user account name and the version name of Photoshop.

 

Mac OS:

/Users/username/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe Photoshop 2021

/Users/username/Library/Preferences/Adobe Photoshop 2021 Settings

/Applications/Adobe Photoshop 2021/Presets

 

Win OS:

C:\Users\username\appData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop 2021\Presets

C:\Users\username\appData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop 2021\Adobe Photoshop 2021 Settings

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop 2021\Presets

 

Good luck!

 

Bojan Živković11378569
Community Expert
Bojan Živković11378569Community Expert
Community Expert
July 10, 2021

"As far as I know, when you create them they should be saved locally."

 

Wrong! If you do not save actions manually you may lose them. For help with actions on another computer wait for someone else with more experience and knowledge on recovering unsaved actions topic like @Stephen Marsh 

TheWayISeeThings
TheWayISeeThingsAuthor
Participating Frequently
July 11, 2021

Thanks for the feedback.  I did not save them manaully, so they are gone.  I'll need to regenerate them.  Could be worse.  My actions were not horribly complex.

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