Save PNG with transparency clipped to visible art only

[BGW5614]

I have seen posts similar to this but not exactly. Need help. -- 

     Up to and including Illustrator version 24.0.2, I could save to a PNG with transparency and the edges/dimensions of the image would clip to the edges of the visible art only, with no extra padding. I did NOT / do not have a clipping path in the Illustrator file. With updates since 24.0.2 the same process (for which I had set up Actions) clips the transparency to same dimensions of hidden layers, which results in extra padding in the final PNG.

     Here's my process steps that worked previously:

• Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S
• Settings: PNG-24; with Transparency; Matte = None; Clip to Artboard is OFF.

Image details:

1. Sample image with extra layers on. This is a label template. It shows a bleed layer that gets trimmed post printing. The black square is a registration mark that also gets trimmed.
2. Shows how final, trimmed image would look. This is how the PNG needs to look (and has been), which is used to superimpose the label image in Photoshop onto products. Any PNG of the same size can be inserted as a replacement in Photoshop without needing to resize the label image or re-do perspective adjustments, etc.
3. What the PNG looks like now. The tranparency padding is same size as the non-visible (turned off) bleed layer. This results in the PNG dimensions being the same size as before but the image area being smaller, due to the extra padding. When imported into Photoshop as a relinked image, the PNG does not fit the same as the previous image.

Illustrator does not perform the same now, even though a supposed fix was put in place where PNGs would clip to a clipping path and not the actual dimensions of the objects cropped by the clipping path. Do I have to now add a clipping path layer to get the same result? (If yes, what a pain as we have thousands of label files for which we have used saved Actions to prepar PNGs for linking in Photoshop.)

[Myra Ferguson]

You might want to try File > Export > Export for Screens... instead of File > Export > Save for Web (Legacy). Or you could report the issue on Uservoice. That's where the Illustrator team looks for bugs and feature requests.

[BGW5614]

I'm very grateful for your reply (finally someone replied with a knowledgable response!). I will try to post something to Uservoice. That is a helpful suggestion.

For background: Export for Screens (unless I'm misunderstanding how it functions) is not practical for our long-established workflow because it requires more steps/clicks than previously and we can't readily create an Action script for our repetitive steps. Export for Screens requires us to select what we want included in the PNG after opening Export for Screens. We already have our various assets organized in layers and groups in the file and turn off all the layers we don't want included in the PNG. With File > Export > Save for Web (Legacy), previously, the PNG transparency automatically clipped to the visible layers and we had a series of actions in place to quickly do that and set the size of the final PNG. So, the "Save for Web (Legacy)" does not offer true legacy functionality because some of the former functionality ceased about the time that the new "Export for Screens" was implemented.

Again, thanks for your reply.