@Fotomaker01RA wrote:
…would likely help is if that Properties Panel (Ps 2022 and prior) could also do what ACR enables in the sense of being able to either have all sub-sections of the panel collapsed, all expanded or some mix of those two.
You probably won’t see that because, from the point of view of Adobe, there are two different UI elements there and they are designed to serve different roles.
One kind of panel stores features in a fixed way regardless of what is selected, such as the traditional Layers or Character panels. You can customize some of these, like the ACR panels you mentioned, or the Tools panel in Photoshop, or the Pages panel in InDesign.
Another kind of panel is not customizable, because it always responds to the current selection. One long time example is the options bar across the top of Photoshop. What it presents will change depending on which tool is active, what state that tool is in, and if something is selected. Many users have asked to “customize that toolbar” but they miss that it isn’t a toolbar, it’s a dynamic responsive set of options for the current tool/selection.
The Properties panel is that second type of panel. It alters itself dynamically depending on what is selected. If nothing is selected, it presents document-level options. The Properties panel is something Adobe has rolled out across many of its major applications, because it can potentially save a lot of space: Instead of leaving many panels open, you can mostly leave the Properties panel open and it will morph and show different options depending on whether you have pixels selected, type selected, vector shape layer selected, etc. Because it is that second type of panel, they don’t let you customize it — it’s constantly customizing itself. Any user customization wouldn’t stick very long; as soon as the selection changes the panel will reconfigure itself again, now showing potentially very different option groups than before.
Those Quick Actions aren’t unique to the Properties panel. All they are is shortcuts to existing commands that you can already get to through menus, keyboard shortcuts, right-clicking… Adobe added them to the Properties panel as convenient shortcuts more visible and discoverable than the other methods, displaying them only during the document states when Adobe thought they might be the most useful.
To get what you want, set up your favorite features in a different panel that is not going to keep changing on its own. That’s what makes Earth Oliver’s suggestion a good solution; you can get this done using the time-tested Actions panel. In it, create actions (shortcuts or multi-step macros) to the features you consider your favorites, put the Actions panel in Button Mode, and now you have your own custom button panel that contains only the features you want, and nothing you don’t want. And if you want your custom Actions panel at the top of a panel stack, you can move it to the top.
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