"Export Save for Web (Legacy)" no longer working

[eyeland99]

Was upgraded to Photoshop 22.3.0 a couple of days ago & now can no longer "Export Save for Web (Legacy)". Every time I try, a popup error box says "This operation can not be completed.". I am running Windows 10. I have tried to research this online & have not been able to find an answer that works for me. Help!

[Linwood Ferguson]

This probably relates to my issue, which remains.  I often produce astro images that are very large TIFF's and 16 bit. I like save-for-web because it will let me simultaneously reduce the size to a tiny fraction, change color space and bit depth for jpg.

I really thought this worked well once upon a time, but in the last year or so (very vague on that) it will hang for long periods of time, like 30-60 minutes, as soon as you enter the option.  I think it's trying to do some display at full resolution as a preview.

The regular export option doesn't maintain metadata, which is JUST SO WRONG.  

The alternative appears to be to actually reside and convert and save-as., then re-open the original for further editing.  Not hard exactly, but tedious (and hope you never make a mistake and SAVE). 

I just did an experiment -- a 9313x6208 pixel tiff, if you use export-as, popped up in about 3 seconds.  The save-for-web is still sitting there, hung after 4 minutes.  It's actually hung, you cannot cancel, you must simply wait or kill photoshop. It will eventually come up, but (a) why is it SOOOOOO much slower than export, and (b) why is there no option for cancel, or maybe a way to default to no-preview until you set a size, or whatever it takes not to just sit there for what can be an hour. 

[PECourtejoie]

pinging @BrettN see: the export as missing metadata is an issue; SFW taking a very long time to show up; EA not respecting slices... request for a no preview setting

[BrettN]

Save for Web is a very old part of Photoshop. We list it as "Legacy" because we have not updated it to modern specs, which is why it is so slow. Export As is the modern replacement. In most respects it surpasses Save for Web, but there are still a few features it is missing (to be added in the future), and is why we still keep Save for Web around.

Safe for Web was made to help balance size and quality in files that will be downloaded on dial-up internet (yes, that is how old it is). It does not handle large images well and it must build a preview before the dialog appears (both due to the older technology it is built from). Export As pops up a dialog first, allowing you to cancel before the preview is complete, and handles much larger files.

Export As does allow you to keep some metadata, but it's job is still to optimize images for the internet. We didn't keep the "All" metadata option largely due to a lack of demand. Copyright info is generally all that is needed. We recently made a big update to Export As though, rebuilding it to modern code standards. This laid the groundwork for our next step: feature parity to Save for Web (so we can eventually remove it). We don't currently have a timeline, but the All metadata option could be coming soon. 

Save As/Save As a Copy is the intended workflow in this situation. However, it does not offer the option of changing the size or color of the image. It does do the bit conversion automatically when you save as JPEG. Using Edit > Convert to Profile is the more powerful option as it gives you full control of the conversion (get to pick the exact profile, not just sRGB, as well as the conversion method for out of gamut colors).

If you are following this workflow a lot, the best thing would be to build an action to fully automate the process. You could essentially have a one-click option to complete all steps, making it even more efficient and powerful than Save for Web or Export As. 

[PECourtejoie]

Thank you, Brett. Did you get a notification of the mention? It did not work when I tried to mention myself...

[JJMack]

Brett will you be adding animated gif support to export before you trash  export save for web? 

[Lumigraphics]

Right now, Export is unusable for my workflow (working pro product photographer) and Save is a PITA that doesn't have all the flexibility I need. Basically, SFW may be built on old tech but its feature set is much better than the alternatives.

As for stripping metadata, you have to actively choose to remove certain namespaces vs simply copy and write to the new file. Please let users make that choice instead of doing it for them.

Final lesson- don't limit your software based on assumed use cases. The very best apps are flexible enough to allow use cases that you (who don't use the software in production) would never think of.

[BrettN]

The feature set in Save for Web is definitely more comprehensive, which is why we never got rid of it. But it is built on such old technology that we can't really update it either. We have to rebuild it from scratch. 

The old Export As was not really focused on this goal. Instead, it was essentially a UI for Generator, making it easier with a dialog box rather than complicated layer renaming. Things like color and metadata management weren't really part of what Generator did, so they were very limited features when tacked on. We weren't dumbing things down, we were just trying to work within these limitations. 

The new Export As is more that effort to rebuild Save for Web from scratch. Its first goal, though, was to reach feature parity with the old Export As which it is replacing. Now that that work is pretty much complete, we'll start seeing progress toward Save for Web parity coming soon. Our hopes is that it will replace both once we've added in more features and controls. 

As far as I'm concerned, I think adding GIF animation is one of the most important features to get in. But I am also angling for better color management as well. 

Also, the tagging didn't seem to work for me either. I don't see it in my notifications nor did I get an email. These are new forums, so there may be some wrinkles to iron out or perhaps we're doing someting incorrectly.

[Stephen_A_Marsh]

Brett, please consider all of the actions and scripts that rely on Save for Web (Legacy). Please take this into account to ensure that if you will replace the legacy option, that in the "feature parity" is the ability for actions to record all parameters and for the Photoshop DOM to support this and for the ScriptingListener plug-in to also support this. If the legacy option was no longer an option, all of the scripts and actions would be broken, so there would have to be a way to easily "update" existing code or actions to use the new method.

Perhaps it would just be better to "hide" the legacy options from the interface, but still keep the underlying code so that old actions or scripts would not be broken, however, when creating new actions or scripts that the new feature would be forefront. As Adobe have been doing, perhaps a prefs option to make the hidden legacy options visible if neeeded would be the best balance.

[PECourtejoie]

Excellent remark!

[BrettN]

We're still a ways out before this will be accomplished, so we don't know exactly how things will pan out. But, just like we have kept the old version of Export As as a "hidden" legacy item for a bit, we would certainly do the same for Save for Web once we do reach feature parity. However, my guess is we'd eventually want to remove Save for Web just to clean up Photoshop's code base. Keeping around old features like this creates bloat as we have to retain old API's that might not be used anywhere else in Photoshop and also rely on old OS and hardware standards. This is certainly the case with the old Export As (we are trying to deprecate the dependant features so we can eventually remove CEP and Generator). Luckily, my team, which is upgrading Export As, is also the one developing the DOM, so we'll be able to manage a smooth transfer of old commands to new ones. We always keep in mind how changes can affect workflows. Sometimes we can't avoid them (due to OS and hardware changes), but we mitigate things when we can. This will likely be a case where we can. More news as things develop.

[Lumigraphics]

Or you could just get rid of Export and SFW and integrate everything in Save/Save As. I'm not convinced that multiple ways to accomplish a core function (saving a file to disk) is the best UI.

[kimt79232946]

I have just uploaded the most recent version of Photoshop CC and tried to create an animated gif. When I used the Save For Web (Legacy), the way I used to do, I got this message. How can make the system recongize the path? I have not had this message before?

[JJMack]

The message would have been informative if it included the missing Path.  Now you has a mystery to solve.

Did you try to it to your desktop to see if the will work? Is the missinf pathe the output folder. I jsust save one to my desktop.

[kimt79232946]

I figured it out!!! I needed to save a copy as a gif. Then it worked! So happy!