Lost brushes and colour swatches in recent update

Forum|Forum|4 months ago
October 4, 2025
1 reply
118 views

My Photoshop, on desktop, just updated and I have lost all my custom brushes, colour swatches, and even some fonts.

I have never had this issue before, usually it updates automatically and everything is fine, but now I have lost all of my presets. I rely on a lot of the brushes and colour swatches for work, and I really don't want to have to put everything back manually as it will take me a long time - especially as I don't have the original files for some of the brushes.

Is there anyway I can fix this?

(Also I checked legacy brushes and they are not there)

macOS

melissapiccone

Community Expert

Did you save your custom presets in the Photoshop Folder in your applications folder? Some updates replace the folders, some don't but you should NEVER save custom presets in there. Make yourself a folder far away - mine is in Drop Box - to keep your stuff. Unfortunately it's probably gone unless you have Time Machine or a backup to pull them from.

Melissa Piccone | Adobe Trainer | Online Courses Author | Fine Artist

Claire H.

Community Manager

Hi @May2494, In addition to checking backups like Time Machine, it’s worth looking in the Legacy Brushes and Swatches panels under the Window menu, as some presets may have been moved there. You can also try resetting Photoshop preferences on launch (hold Cmd+Opt+Shift on Mac or Ctrl+Alt+Shift on Windows) to see if that restores anything. If Creative Cloud removed the previous version during the update, some settings may not have migrated, so checking update preferences in the future can help prevent this. Please let me know if you are still experiencing issues, and we can continue troubleshooting. ^CH

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