How to resize an image while maintaining its aspect ratio without pressing Shift

[Luciano5E1B]

The Problem: Today I'm sitting inside a project and I insert an image in a new layer, I take my mouse to drag the image to make it bigger. Usually when I do this, the image I'm expanding will expand while maintaining its proportions (ex: If it's a square image, it will stay as a square as I drag its corners to make it bigger) however now, I go to grab a corner and expand it and the image doesn't maintain its proportions and becomes distorted. I now have to hold shift down while dragging for the image to maintain its proportions.

If there's some kind of setting that'll allow me to go revert back to how it used to be, that'd be great. If possible I'd rather not have to hold shift down everytime I want to expand an image/make an image larger withoit its aspect ratio being affected. I'm just not used to it and its just another extra button I have to press.

[John Waller]

Go to Preferences > General and Uncheck Enable Legacy Free Transform

Historically the default has always been to press Shift to maintain the aspect ratio. Without warning, during CC 2019, Adobe boldly reversed the old default behaviour.

There was an outcry from veteran Photoshop users about the new default of not pressing Shift. So the new preference was introduced by Adobe to give us the choice to set the default to Shift or Not Shift. Sounds like you prefer the new behaviour of not pressing Shift.

[Trevor.Dennis]

There was another post earlier today (NZ time) from someone who thought ths shift key interaction with aspect ratio had gone back to legacy.  Makes you wonder if something is going on with defaults.  Preferences wouldn't change with a minor update though.

[alexandren78219404]

For sure it has gone back to legacy.

But I like the way that it maintains the aspect ratio during resizing without pressing the shift key.

How do I get back to the last way?

[Conrad C · Accepted solution]

In addition to the preference setting, whenever you use Edit > Free Transform you can switch this at any time using the Maintain Aspect Ratio option. If Maintain Aspect Ratio is enabled, dragging a handle scales proportionally, and you hold Shift for disproportionate scaling. Disabling Maintain Aspect Ratio swaps the behavior: Dragging a handle scales disproportionally, and you hold Shift for proportional scaling.

[Luciano5E1B]

Thanks Conrad! That link icon to maintain the aspect ratio was turned off on my end. I got it all fixed now, appreciate the visual + response!