How do you load keyboard shortcuts? [2011]

[Mobius Strip]

Hi all.

I don't get it: The keyboard-shortcuts dialog has a way to save sets of shortcuts, but no way to load them.  What is the point then?

Thanks for any insight.

[ivanb6489798 · Accepted solution]

I just found if you double click the .kys file it will open in Photoshop and it will automatically set the shortcuts you saved in that file. I hope this help you.

[Mobius Strip]

Thanks!  Most users wouldn't do that, but I guess for now it's the most convenient workaround for Adobe's petulant refusal to fix this.

[Susan236039181x6x]

None of my presets migrated upgrading from PS 2019 to 2021. Have been going in maddening circles all day trying to get my keyboard shortcuts to appear in PS 2021 (exporting/importing, dragging/dropping, incantations, endless Adobe forum arguements, YouTube, etc) and just happened to see your simple, beautiful one sentence solution. THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!!

[Cheerful_fantasy1549]

thank you, this helped me in 2024!

[Mobius Strip]

I'd say "unbelievable that it's still not fixed," but with Adobe it's 100% believable... if not expected.

[Katarzyna5EC4]

I love that I am reading this in 2020 and it's still not fixed 😄 
It's funny how people can jump to defend almost anythng, including a giant corporation with honestly almost monopoly on the graphics market when someone makes a very valid complain about a nonsensical user experience which breaks all the rules established by not only adobe itself but also kind of the rest of the world doing softwere ever: the rule that if you can save a thing, you usually can load a thing and the two icons tend to be close by. Adobe markets as a professional product that is also user friendly. That is absolutely not a user friendly solution we are talking about here. End of topic 😄 Come on, people. 

[Mobius Strip]

Four years later, and Adobe is still demonstrating the fraudulence of its software-rental scam.

[PBDsgn]

I ran into this problem when PS updated and wiped out my custom keybinds. I googled it and found this thread- but ironically no real "solution".   So I started messing around with it.

I discovered that if you simply open the custom .kys file you create when you export the shortcuts, it installs them. 

Not well documented and bizarre, but that's Adobe for you *shrug*.

[Loïc_Bramoullé]

I actually realized I have slight PTSD from the number of times I lost all my PS workspace at one epoch I was not yet implementing a fierce "backup everything to dropbox every time you change a shortcut or anything". I learned Substance painter yesterday and my hands started to shake for the whole evening when I realized all the hotkeys I just customized, where gonna be destroyed the next time I need to reinstal, as they are stored in the registry, and editing keys there is not something specially healthy. Adobe damages your health basically. why though.. there's no reason.. it's just.. a file... to put there on the side.. and.. back .. IN.... There's years of your professional life in this file, it's what allows you to use the software, and pay for it to do your job.. it's very moronic to say "no artists don't need to backup their prefs we have user data.." No one on earth managed to keep the same photoshop install since 1997 without updating or resinstalling or updating your machine...... restoring preferences is obviously essential.

[Mobius Strip]

B-b-but do you have USER DATA to support that glaringly obvious use case?

No? Then Chris Cox is gonna school you with his vast knowledge of how every user does everything... or at least on why Adobe's going to do nothing: because tutorial-doing grandmas with numerous custom keyboard maps licked this problem years ago.

[Trevor.Dennis]

Chris sadly left Adobe several years ago.  BTW  I love that the OP from an eleven year old thread has responded to a two year old post. 

I wonder if sets of shortcuts are saved inside custom workspace files?  

For those people who think they have lost that sort of data after installing a major update, it's always worth looking in what's left of the previous version folder hierarchy.  Presets and settings tend to only get saved one previous version, and sometimes presets (brushes are a typical example) remain in the previous version folderes without being migrated to the new version.

C:\Users\[your user name]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe

[Loïc_Bramoullé]

Thanks for the answer Trevor, that's another solution for emergency workspace restoration. What we've been hoping since last century is just a "you won't ever delete my workspace" button, but having a handful of hard to remember solutions is good enough for now. The issue I had several times back in 2014-15 was that after opening a new version of PS and realizing there was still no new feature, same liquify brush tool resize broken, and sudden crashes, I opened the previous version and my workspace was reset, actually deleted in the appdata, several times in this period. And as the workspace is made of like 20 different files, of different types, in different location, impossible to remember, I took me a long time before implementing enough methods to make sure I can start working in a few hours of pref-manual restoration if it happens again.

[Mobius Strip]

How about a single "save preferences"/"load preferences" panel with checkboxes for anything you can save and load?

Crazy, I know. But maybe now that Captain Nyet has left the building, someone has come on board with a more realistic view.

[Loïc_Bramoullé]

That sounds insanely difficult and unintuitive, we'll have an easier time solving the climate crisis by living in outer space. Imagine if the save button was showing an explorer to pick a location for the file, for example on a secure folder in a backed-up drive or on your personal cloud, that is unconscionable to solve this issue with.. mere code... It's obvious why 25 years of development from a company that's only worth nearly 300 billion US dollars and generates only 17 billions US dollars per year couldn't tackle this, even if the main complaint from any user.

[Loïc_Bramoullé]

Mobius, remember that Adobe only has 26 thousand employees, it's little resources to implement basic healthy default features, like, making sure your day's work is not destroyed regularly without valid excuse. Not looking at you absence of autosave feature. You don't need to be there since the unreliable "recovered-file" mad-scientist-idea feature took your place.

[Mobius Strip]

Remember how Adobe's software-rental rip-off was going to make everything better? 10 years ago:

The shift is intended to ramp up the pace of innovation at Adobe Systems Inc. with continuous online updates replacing annual product cycles. It also aims to bring together traditional tools like Photoshop and Illustrator with online marketing software and services under Adobe's Marketing Cloud programs.

"This gives us the freedom to think differently and help us innovate more quickly,"David Wadhwani, Adobe's senior vice president and general manager of digital media, tells Forbes in an interview.

And this has turned out to be the lie we all knew it was at the time.

[Tarek34249480bsnp]

thats was helpfull thanks .

[Mobius Strip]

You're welcome.