P: Divide slice limits too low, and creates too many slices when reopened

Report · Feb 08, 2016

Hello! I am attempting to slice a sprite sheet into evenly spaced sections so I could export them all as individual, identically sized pngs. I am trying to divide a 2000 px by 3400 px png into 8 rows and 17 columns. Photoshop was able to divide them horizontally into 17 slices, but when I try
to divide vertically into 8 slices, Photoshop refuses to divide it into more
than 5 columns. Similarly, if I first tell it to divide vertically into 8, it
refuses to divide into more than 12 rows.

Additionally, Photoshop slows to a crawl when I open up the divide slice window
the second time after applying, and when it finally opens the window, there are
slice guides covering the entire canvas and Photoshop becomes so slow it is
unresponsive.

Is it supposed to be impossible to automatically slice the document into more
than 100 sections? It looks like I can make it work if I slice it manually, but
I need the accuracy that comes with divide slice.

I am running the latest version of Photoshop CC 2015 on Windows 7. Took my screenshots before updating but even after updating and rebooting I'm getting the same behavior.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Report · Feb 08, 2016

Hmm, it does seem to have some internal constraint.
Sometimes it seems to limit to 200, other times to 100.
I'll take a look at the code and see what I can figure out.

Report · Feb 08, 2016

The dialog is trying to enforce a limit of 100 slices, and apparently has a few problems (since I managed 200 slices at one point). The weird thing is that the 100 limit only seems to apply to the divide slices dialog.

If you'd like to change this to a feature request - I can see about bumping up that limit for the next major release. Then we need to determine: what is an appropriate limit for the number of slices in either dimension, and the total limit on the number of slices created?

I'm still trying to find what happened on reopening the divide slices window.

Report · Feb 09, 2016

I would love if this could be made into a feature request! A higher limit would be very useful for working with big sprite sheets. And even if not a higher limit, a consistent limit and some sort of notification when you've reached it might be helpful.

I'm not sure what an appropriate limit would be. 200 would be probably be sufficient for myself in most cases, but I don't know how others use this feature.

In regards to figuring out what's going on upon reopening the window, just now I tried dividing a document into 5 by 5 slices. When I open the window again, the settings were set to 5 by 5, but it divided the document into 25 by 25? Well over a 200 slice limit but not enough to freeze Photoshop. And when I try to open divide slice again, Photoshop either froze up or slowed down so far I couldn't use it. I'm wondering if it was trying to divide each of the 25 by 25 slices into 5 again?

Report · Feb 09, 2016

Yeah, I think it was trying to subdivide the existing slices somehow.
Still haven't gotten to that part (due to other things interrupting).

Report · Feb 09, 2016

After the first dialog, you were left with ~100 slices ALL selected.
The divide dialog then tried to divide those 100 into 100 each for a total of 10,000 slices. Yeah, that part is slow.

Seems the dialog remembers the last settings and tries to apply them again, even if they don't really make sense. Plus it leaves all the newly created slices selected, so if you immediately open the dialog again, it'll try to divide each of those the same way you just did to the big slice. Yuck.

Hmm, and the dialog invalidation when you enter values that exceed the maximums isn't quite right.

Report · Feb 10, 2016

Oh I see! I didn't realize that I had all of the slices selected when I was trying to re-slice the document. I thought that divide slice was just used for the entire document, but it makes sense that it would try and divide the selected slice/slices.