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Question

Photoshop CS5 autosave feature?

Forum|Forum|15 years ago
May 20, 2010
21 replies
154855 views

Hi. Is there a way to set up Photoshop CS5 to periodically save my work? Thanks.

This topic has been closed for replies.

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vengevenge

Participant

I really can't stand little know-it-alls. Control-S. Control-S. Tee-hee. Nya. Hee-hee. Aren't you smart like me?

This does not work if you have to SCAN A BUNCH of IMAGES. I have lost hours upon hours of work trying to scan booklets only to have Photoshop die a horrible death.

YOU CANNOT SAVE INBETWEEN SCANS. thank you photoshop. THANK YOU for torture. and an impregnable scratch disk database which serves no purpose.

I refuse to re-scan these ******* images. Computers have ruined our lives.

B

bkmvl

Participating Frequently

One thing that would be nice is a feature that i like in Corel Painter and that is the Iterative save(CTRL-ALT-S) for saving the filename with 001,002 and so on,in the event of a crash
you might at least not lose all your work, but of course won't help if you forget to save

Semaphoric

Community Expert

What is so hard about pressing Ctrl+S periodically? Sheez!

S

sfxjhw2

Participating Frequently

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting

A

Anonymous

As others have stated: I too have never ever missed an autosave feature in more than a decade of PS usage.

It would be maddening to have PS to suddenly save your file in a state which you don't want.( making selections, flattening layers, etc...)

I for sure would disable autosave and stick to save/ save as etc... It takes tenths of a second to click "save as" If you lose files by not saving and not having multiple copies, it's your own fault imho.

Noel Carboni

Legend

Hobotor wrote:

It would be maddening to have PS to suddenly save your file in a state which you don't want.( making selections, flattening layers, etc...)

You folks are thinking too small! It's not rocket science to realize you wouldn't want it autosaving over your master document!

The problem to be solved is this: People lose information because of unexpected crashes or power outages or whatever. Just because YOU and I haven't done so because we've developed good CYA habits doesn't mean everyone has, and like it or not your having to remember to save occasionally DOES take away some of your concentration.

What if, when you restarted Photoshop after everything was brought back up, it presented you with a dialog that said something like "Auto-recovery has found copies of the last documents you were editing. Would you like to continue editing them?" This is not dissimilar to what Microsoft Word does.

The process, of course, would need to be:

Unobtrusive when saving. Maybe a slight slowdown could be tolerated, but no interruption to work. The save would have to be done in the background.
Automatic. When starting up Photoshop it should prompt you to recover - or not - any work it found that was potentially lost.
Robust. It should just work every time, not fail to recover lost work at the worst possible time. Answering the auto recover dialog without thinking (i.e., blindly just pressing [ OK ] as people are apt to do) shouldn't result in the loss of recovery capability.
Use all the system's capabilities. It should be possible, for example, to find previous saved copies in the Recycle Bin.

This is all an academic exercise for me, as I actually DO save my documents as a matter of habit, and my workstation is on UPS and very stable, and I don't lose work. But I do think such a feature would have merit, with little to no downside, even for folks who have already developed good work habits.

-Noel

A

Anonymous

Once again Noel has stated eligantly, the simple truth of the situation and offered another good possibility to remedy the situation. Those on this thread that are experienced power users have obviously have strong, well developed work habits, probably based on past bad experiences. My first big loss (in the mid 80's) was from the local power company inspecting their meter and found it loose, jiggled it not once but twice and took down 8 systems worth of work...all of us lost at least an hour worth of work...8+hrs of Lost Opportunity! From that point on I started saving every 10-15 minutes. My loss back in June (this thread) was my bad because I had moved that UPS to another system temporarily...still I came Here to find solutions and let Adobe know my thoughts on having a AutoSave feature available after 12+ Revs.

Noel's & My point here is that Stuff Happens regardless of whether it is an Adobe problem or not. All OS systems are relatively unstable and you never know if the latest patch will kill something you use or not...same with Adobe. Then there is Malware, Viruses, Trojans, etc., Hardware, Software conflicts, and lots of other possibilities for crashing. Novice or new users are the most vulnerable to any of the myriad of possibilities. PS is the flagship and pretty much defacto standard in this arena and I am sure represents significant revenue streams for Adobe. IF a novice or new user forks out the buck$ for it, they should have some modicum of basic security in their considerable learning curve, where they are less likely to be paying attention to Save AS. I just want it because Sometimes I do get tunnel vision on a project and go beyond my 15min. protocol, and Push the envelope of Safe Workflow Practices...And IT IS MY Choice To Use It OR NOT! We Deserve that Choice!

PJH

Semaphoric

Community Expert

I would not consider myself a "power user", but I had no difficulty getting into the "save early, save often" habit. One of my favorite features of Pshop is "Revert", which doesn't really work if you haven't saved . But seriously, I can't recall ever losing work due to Pshop crashing. I can only recall Pshop quitting itself once or twice, years ago.

If there were Autosave, I would be sure to disable it.

A

Anonymous

I have been enjoying the latest lively discussion...and that is the point I think. Maybe if this thread gets long enough it can effect change. With that said and my earlier post here, I have adopted an avid (no pun to Premiere) Save As strategy because I had to. I recently did a restoration of a family Tin Type in really bad shape. I worked at <5px for several days...besides going pixel blind and having to walk away every hour or so, I realized my file size was quite large and started saving copies for backups as well as direction changes if I needed to, and I did, twice. I ended up with 15 copies in various states (pushing a Gig). The point is I could Not allow any possibility of having to go through all or any part of that process again.

Additionally, I recently did some research on PNG/PNG-A file architecture and had a pretty big Ah Ha about what Chris had said before about Gigs of data in a save. If you take 24bit color and add 24 bits of alpha to that and confined to a shape...whoa, but the key is the compression algorithm and it's pretty magical. The issue as I see it is the current architecture of PS based on 12+ revs, And the high probability that no one can think of a clean way to do what we are asking. I have no idea if PS has had a full rewrite in those 12+ revs, or not? I do know that I have worked with PLC code that was started poorly went through 10-12 revs until it became unbearable (Spagetti Code) to add or change things, so it had to be rewritten from scratch with all the newest Code and strategies. It was never pretty.

We have come a long way since Turtle...if any of you remember, and Autodesk broke the ground and the mold on Vector based graphics with ~100k man hours on code. PS is now a pretty phoenominal hybrid using vector & Bit map with lots of toys and tools, albeit not intuitive to me anyway, to be able to produce some amazing results. I have only used it since V7 and still don't consider myself proficient, but my work flow ethics stem from engineering for 25+ years and being able to write Lisp back in the day to help my work flow...And doing what I Had To, to get the job done. Hopefully some bright mind at Adobe will get an Ah Ha and figure out a clean way to have an AutoSave feature...but it may take a while....effecting Change is not always easy.

PJH

S

sfxjhw2

Participating Frequently

I can't believe this is even up for discussion.

It would be an autosave OPTION. let the user decide whether or not to save that 'gigabyte file' periodically, and they might (*gasp*) want to if the file is that important. I came to this thread becasue I kicked my power cord and lost a days worth of work. Would have been nice to have an autosave. But the thing is there are MANY reasons why you would have an improper PS shutdown: computer error, power loss, windows crash, adobe crash..etc. If you don't want to give the user the OPTION of enabling an autosave (yes even for that 1GB file) thats fine, but know that you are sitting back as people lose literally thousands of hours of work and productivity across the PS userbase, because, let's face it: when every program on your computer has some autosave feature (audacity, word, excel, pdf annotator, acrobat, etc..) you are NOT in the habit of saving every 10 seconds. This seems so obvious to me, I don't know why there is such reluctance.

the_wine_snob

Inspiring

But the thing is there are MANY reasons why you would have an improper PS shutdown: computer error, power loss, windows crash, adobe crash..etc.

And this is exactly why most PS power-users have, long ago, incorporated systematic Save_As operations into their workflow, when they want them, and not during an intricate Selection process, where if there was an AutoSave, all would be lost.

I feel that too many PS users do not understand, or even know of, Save_As, and Save_As_a_Copy. They should become great friends with each, along with the Ctrl+S (Save).

In almost 2 decades, and working with some monster images, I have never lost more than about 30 mins. work. I always have my Save_As to go back to.

If such was introduced, I would demand that it have a toggle, and that there was some sort of a flag, visible in the GUI, when it was on. I can just imagine all the folk complaining that they just lost a 2 hour Selection, when AutoSave kicked in.

Hunt

S

sfxjhw2

Participating Frequently

"And this is exactly why most PS power-users have, long ago, incorporated systematic Save_As operations into their workflow, when they want them, and not during an intricate Selection process, where if there was an AutoSave, all would be lost."

Really? Do you have something aside from anadotal evidence to back this up? Actually it's not really that relevant because...

"I feel that too many PS users do not understand, or even know of, Save_As, and Save_As_a_Copy. They should become great friends with each, along with the Ctrl+S (Save)."

Maybe. But it would also be nice if there was an OPTION for those of us who have not habituated yet. Remember we are talking about habit here, and when the entire computng industry relies on autosave, it's diffitcult to say, "why don't you just save periodically', because "NO OTHER PROGRAM MAKES ME DO THAT SO I FORGOT!"

"In almost 2 decades, and working with some monster images, I have never lost more than about 30 mins. work. I always have my Save_As to go back to."

Oh, well since you haven't had any trouble then I guess that must hold true to the rest of the world. (In the meantime I've been using PS heavily for 5 years and have lost at least half-a-week's work if you sum it up).

"If such was introduced, I would demand that it have a toggle, and that there was some sort of a flag, visible in the GUI, when it was on. I can just imagine all the folk complaining that they just lost a 2 hour Selection, when AutoSave kicked in. "

Exactly! That's how you please those who care about the Selection and those who dont, those who have an unstable computer and those you dont, those who can't remember to save and those who dont--you give them the *OPTION*. Otherwise the sentiment is, "well I don't see why we need that feature, if people would just work the way *I* do." This is the most narrowminded sentment in computing and if we all stuck to it we would all be using the console or running windows XP ad infinitum.

A

Anonymous

Using the keyboard command/contol+S frequently is a very good habit to acquire.

It is short, sweet and reliable, and best of all.... under the operator's control and works with every program flawlessly.

Autosave would just be in the way with my workflow.

I do not even think about hitting Cmd/Cnt+S. It is like looking in the rearview mirror while driving.

Please excuse me for mentioning this, but you, the operator, are the most important part of the process.

All computers and programs hang, and with all due respect, it sounds like Adobe is being blamed for poor work habits.

Noel Carboni

Legend

I'm going to side with the folks who feel Adobe should add more sophistication re: saving files. I realize the architecture may not suit doing this easily, but perhaps it's worth putting some extra effort into... Even a LOT of extra effort. It's software - it could be done with sufficient expenditure.

I hate to point out the obvious but... Photoshop can clearly write gigabytes to the Scratch temp file without blocking user operations much. It's rather a thin argument to say that it's impractical to write to the disk in the background, even when we're talking about large blocks of data.

I'd really like to see the following implemented... I believe this would make Photoshop a more professional tool:

1. A configurable background autosave process. Off by default, those with computers more than capable of supporting large disk operations without affecting interactivity (or who are willing to take a performance hit for a little peace of mind) could enable it.

2. A recovery process that will allow one to recover an image from a remnant Scratch temp file (invoked during the next Photoshop startup).

3. Use of the Recycle Bin on Windows systems to hold files that are superseded via Save operations. This covers the rare case where something goes wrong during save, leaving the user with no file at all.

Note that if we had #2, we might not need #1 quite so badly.

-Noel

A

Anonymous

Noel Carboni wrote:
I'm going to side with the folks who feel Adobe should add more sophistication re: saving files...

Which folks are saying that they should not?

Noel Carboni

Legend

Let's just say the idea has been resisted on occasion. Possibly not overtly in this thread, but Chris has implied writing gigabytes is of particular difficulty.

-Noel

A

Anonymous

Hi, I just lost about 2 hrs worth unfortunately because this box wasn't on a UPS...it is now. I read this year long thread and am amazed Adobe hasn't solved this issue way back. I am an old engineer using ACAD all the way back to 2.0. I believe they started AutoSave in version 9 (Late 80's) and has been bullet proof since and minimally disruptive even on large files...considering the alternatives. Your code jockey's may want to confer with them for tips especially with AI.

Thanks for those above with the tips of 3rd party code to help with the issue. I downloaded 2 of them and will give them a spin. I have Production Premium CS4 and Design Premium CS5 on a dedicated XP Box and found Premiere to be painful in this issue...definitely got a solid habit of ^S with several large projects...this time my bad from the weather/power glitch and adding the UPS. Adobe should fix this in my opinion...and give choice on big file save timing if necessary.

Chris Cox

Legend

Your code jockey's may want to confer with them for tips especially with AI.

Small changes to vector data are inherently easier (and faster) to save incrementally than image data. You're talking kilobytes versus gigabytes of data.

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