Suddenly ALL of my settings in Photoshop have DISAPPEARED

[Carmen Ray]

This is a recurring problem. I have reinstalled Photoshop but this continues to happen. It is a very serious issue. I need to get my settings back. And all of my patterns and colors. I have not made any changes to the app whatsoever but when I switched it on today, ALL of my settings and saved patterns etc are GONE. I can't afford to keep losing work like this. The last time this happened, the agent removed all trace of Photoshop from my laptop and it was reinstalled from scratch. This has happened AGAIN,

[alexbolotina 3791]

I faces this problem severel times already - it drives me mad to lose all my settings!!!

[XPRAMT]

I am writing to report a significant issue that I and many other users have encountered while using Adobe Photoshop. This problem has caused inconvenience and data loss, and I believe it warrants immediate attention.

Issue Description
Suddenly, all my customized settings in Photoshop disappeared without any warning. This includes personal presets, color settings, workspace configurations, and other adjustments that took considerable time to set up. The unexpected loss disrupts my workflow and creates unnecessary downtime for restoring settings manually.

Registry Impact
Moreover, I discovered that the issue is not limited to Photoshop's internal settings. It appears that Photoshop also affects the system registry by deleting all contents under:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers

This behavior is alarming as it affects critical registry entries unrelated to Photoshop, potentially causing broader system issues.

Relevance to Users
This problem is not an isolated case. Multiple users in the Adobe Community Forums have reported similar experiences. The thread here contains numerous accounts of the same issue. While resetting Photoshop preferences is often suggested, it is not a long-term solution, as it does not address the root cause of the problem.

Impact
Loss of time and productivity due to manual reconfiguration.
Potential system instability caused by unauthorized registry changes.
Frustration among users who rely on Photoshop for professional work.
Suggestions
Investigate the Cause: Please prioritize investigating this issue, especially regarding why registry changes occur.
Implement Safeguards: Develop mechanisms to back up and restore user settings automatically to prevent data loss.
Improve Communication: Notify users if any changes to settings or the system registry are necessary and explain why.

[D Fosse]

@XPRAMT 

This is how Photoshop has alwys worked since the beginning.

All settings and preferences are version specific. They are stored in your Windows user account, and each version has its own folder. This contains the entire app configuration.

Old settings may not have the exact same meaning in new application code.

That's one reason why you should always save out actions, brushes, presets etc if you want to reload in the new version.

There is an option in the installer to migrate settings. I would actually not recommend that, because this is rewritten on every application exit, and an irregular shutdown can easily corrupt preferences. Errors will accumulate. Corrupt preferences can cause strange and erratic behavior, often mistaken for "bugs".

[XPRAMT]

Thank you for your response to my issue. However, the explanation regarding "Photoshop settings and preferences being version-specific" and "incompatibility caused by upgrades" does not address the problem I encountered, because:

My Photoshop has not been updated or upgraded.
The loss of settings did not occur after any version change or reinstallation. Instead, it happened suddenly during one of the software's startups. Prior to this, I had not made any changes to the settings, nor experienced any system crashes or irregularities.

Unexpected Registry Deletion.
In addition to the loss of Photoshop settings, I also discovered that all entries under the Windows registry path
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers
were deleted. This seems to be an unintended behavior affecting the system at a deeper level rather than a normal issue with how settings are stored. This has no relation to your mention of "setting migration" since I did not use that feature.

Core Issues
This issue should not be simply regarded as a migration problem. Instead, it involves:

The sudden loss of settings, unrelated to version updates.
Unintended registry deletion, which may affect overall system stability.
Request for Assistance
I hope Adobe can:

Investigate the cause of this sudden loss of settings, especially in cases where no version upgrade or changes occurred.
Verify whether Photoshop might unintentionally modify or delete system registry entries unrelated to the application.
As a long-time user of Photoshop, I heavily rely on this tool for professional work. This issue has significantly impacted my workflow, and I hope Adobe will take it seriously and provide a resolution.

[davescm]

Why do you believe Photoshop deleted those unrelated registry settings? It sounds more like a system issue has impacted settings on your PC which may also have corrupted Photoshop and other settings?

I have never heard of any registry corruption caused by Photoshop, and would start with scanning the sytem disk for errors and corruption.

I did have an issue a few years ago, where random Adobe files were being converted to 0 byte files. Which meant several re-installs over a two week period. After much pulling out of hair, I traced the issue to overzealous antivirus software (I won't name it here) which was changing those files to 0 bytes without flagging them. Changing to alternative anti-virus software solved the issue immediately.

Dave

[D Fosse]

@XPRAMT 

Dave is correct. If your preferences suddenly got reset outside of updates, that means Photoshop was unable to write them correctly at shutdown. That's either a problem in your Windows user account, permissions or otherwise - or Photoshop crashed. Or Windows crashed (although I haven't seen that in two decades). Crashes are usually hardware or drivers.

Either way, this is most likely a hardware issue, or a Windows issue.

(side note: the built in Windows antivirus is so good now, they pour such massive resources into it, that it's hard to see any third-party vendor doing any better. The market for antivirus has basically collapsed).

[Marjan 2]

I've just had a similar experience with my entire Photoshop preferences being reset to default (this includes brushes and actions and all tool settings).
This isn't the first time this has happened to me (if I total it all up, it's probably nearing 3 digits...).
This does not happen during updates.
When this happens, I usually see an error popup along the lines of failing to read preferences when Photoshop is starting up.

The last time I was fed up with this I just set up photoshop how I wanted it and then set the entire preferences folder ( C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\PHOTOSHOP FOLDER ) as read only (or removed write permissions for the User I'm using). This prevented Photoshop from overwriting everything with its defaults (if anything, I never encountered any issues again). I think I also set the Photoshop folder itself as read only (or parts of it - presets). I'm having trouble remembering exactly what I did since I did this so long ago.

The above method of setting the entire folder as read only resolving the problem also eliminates any anti-virus software as being the cause, since those run at elevated permissions and can do whatever they want with user folders.

The fact that preventing Photoshop from writing any preferences keeps it working also means that Photoshop itself is the issue. I'm not too familiar with how Photoshop saves preferences in the background, but if understood you right @D Fosse, ALL preferences are saved on Photoshop exit, right?
If so, Adobe changing the behavior of how saving works would probably eliminate the majority of issues.
If this happens 1% of Photoshop exits (since every exit saves preferences), it means you'll likely experience all your preferences resetting once every 100 exits.
If preferences are only saved if they are CHANGED, the % of exits affected by this issue would be drastically lower.

I only remembered this was an issue now because I did a clean install of Photoshop recently, which included removing all of those fixes since having any of those seems to prevent Photoshop from installing itself.
If memory serves me right, this has been happening since around Photoshop v21 or so.
I was hoping this to have been fixed by now... but here we are 5 years later in 2025... with this still being an issue.

One question @XPRAMT... Did you by any chance leave Photoshop open when shutting down or shortly before shutting down your PC?
I think that might be a contributing factor, but I haven't tested it enough to confirm this as a reproduce.

[davescm]

'If preferences are only saved if they are CHANGED, the % of exits affected by this issue would be drastically lower.'

Saved preferences contain a lot more data than just the user set preferences. They contain data used internally by the application which changes as it runs, hence the save on every exit. You can make a copy of the folder as a back up which can be used to reset all to that last saved state, but you will need to remember to do that again after any update as the data being saved internally can change with updates.

Dave

[Marjan 2]

Saved preferences contain a lot more data than just the user set preferences. They contain data used internally by the application which changes as it runs, hence the save on every exit.

Personally, that seems like a very weird design decision... mixing internal application data and user preferences inside the same files. Without any actual Photoshop devs to chime in on what exactly is going on here we'll both be speculating. I'll just say that mixing the two in the same files is going to lead to situations like these, where not even changing any preferences (keyboard shortcuts for example) is going to end up corrupting all of user's preferences because some internal data the program tracks failed to save correctly (I'm speculating that this is how it works).

You can make a copy of the folder as a back up which can be used to reset all to that last saved state, but you will need to remember to do that again after any update as the data being saved internally can change with updates.

Sure I could, but it's just a giant waste of time to keep having to do that.
I, as the end user and customer, have to keep backing up settings because Photoshop is incapable of not corrupting user preferences? In 2025? This is not a new program. This is not a new company.
I just want the program to work as I expect it to work without having to jump through hoops just to get something as basic as user preferences to work as they do with any other program.

[RHE.]

As of today, I also experienced this problem. All my PS settings reset to default. I managed to get them back manually, but this took some time. I also followed the tip in this post about running as administrator. I hope this doesn't happen again!