flipping Canvas slow for no reason

Why doesn't photoshop check for the history states?

By @Flowgun

What happens when you use the History panel to select the history state?

Also, Ctrl+Z will step back one state at a time.

Your post is in Ideas, so the engineers will see it regardless of comments made by users.

Jane

yeah I know. you basically repeated what I said with an analogy. My point is that the function can be smarter and pull up from the already built-up flipped castle if it's available.

Good point — Photoshop currently recalculates the canvas flip each time, even if it’s the same action, which slows things down on complex files. Undo/redo is faster since it just reverts the state. Best workaround is using undo, but your suggestion makes sense as a feature request for Adobe to optimize.

@Flowgun I disagree. Imagine you're building a massive Lego castle with special moving parts and lights. The "Flip Canvas" command is like a "deconstruct and rebuild" button. When you hit it, Photoshop has to take apart every single Lego brick (each pixel and layer) and then rebuild the entire castle piece by piece in its new, flipped position, making sure all the lights and moving parts still work. This is a big job and takes a long time.

On the other hand, the "Undo" command isn't a "rebuild" button at all. It's more like a time machine. When you flip the canvas and then hit "Undo," Photoshop just zaps the entire project back to the way it was a second ago. It doesn't have to rebuild anything because it already saved a snapshot of the castle before you flipped it. That's why "Undo" is so much faster. The problem is that your hotkey is set to the slow "deconstruct and rebuild" button, not the quick "time machine" button.