PS 2018 CC - All my actions are gone

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
February 14, 2022
3 replies
515 views

I opened photoshop and all my actions that I have created myself are gone. I made all of these actions years ago and have been using them for as long without making any changes to them. Suddenly when opening photoshop all my actions are missing from the action panel and I can't find a corresponding .atn file on my computer. I am using PS 2018 and auto update is off.

Some of my other preferences seem to have reset, such as opening to the "start" workspace (which i had disabled) and the interface color was different. Other preferences, like custom keyboard shortcuts seem to still be there.

Are my actions really gone? Am i going to have to recreate all of them? This is a huge waste of time for me and I am very upset about it.

This topic has been closed for replies.

Stephen Marsh

Community Expert

Actions have always needed to be manually saved:

Sadly, the instructions are not always known or understood and people just assume that things are automatically saved, when they are not. This has to be done per action set.

There is xbytor's xtools, which can save out every set automatically and this could be triggered via the scripts events manager, however just like the native save command it still requires user input and is not hands free:

Bojan Živković11378569

Community Expert

Did you ever saved your actions since you are using them for years? If not then you are in problem.

Perhaps you can not remember where actions are saved? Try to search for ATN files using search feature.

Actions panel is where actions are stored (loaded) temporary. If newly created actions are not saved then it is matter of time when you will lost them.

D

default8vfibz3zu98lAuthor

Participant

I have very old versions on my company server. I was under the impression adobe saved the .atn files in the program files. I did a search for .atn files. Thats how i know they are not among adobe program files.

I remodified the old version so I have them back. I am wondering why this happened. Why would my preferences suddenly get messed up and actions deleted? I have auto update off, and one of the reasons is so i don't have to deal with problems like this. This is a waste of time for me so my purpose in asking is to figure out why it happened so i can avoid wasting time in the future.

Of course now I have the newly created version saved as a back up, but why weren't the old ones saved in the program files and why did they suddenly disappear? Also other preferences got changed which isn't as big a deal but still a pain to spend all day discovering the changes and having to change them back. For a program that i pay for monthly this is an unacceptable waste of my time.

Earth Oliver

Legend

for reasons no one but Adobe knows, Actions are not auto-backed up to the cloud, but swatches and patterns are? Makes absolutely no sense to me, but that's what they decided was more important than Actions.