Adobe, a request for you please. A request born from two decades of working with applications, application developers, and application error messages:
Please, for the love of God, when you present an error to a user, make sure that error is accurately descriptive. For the exorbitant rates we pay to use this software, the least you can do is not pepper it with error messages that waste our time in addition to our money.
To wit: this afternoon I spent over an hour fighting the sudden appearance of an error message when trying to open .webp files (which were working fine yesterday, then suddenly not fine today). Various iterations of this message included:
- First, out of the blue: "Could not load the user measurement scale presets file becasue Photoshop does not recognize this type of file".
- Then after resetting my measurement scales to the defaults: "Could not import the clipboard file becasue Photoshop does not recognize this type of file".
- And lastly the most generic version, as if Photoshop had just given up: "Could not complete your request because Photoshop does not recognise this type of file".
You may notice all of these errors have one core theme in common: Photoshop couldn't do something because "Photoshop does not recognise this type of file". Weird, considering it's been recognizing the .webp file format fine with zero issue up through just yesterday.
Thinking maybe the file was corrupted, I tried opening it in Windows' native MSPaint. It opened fine. A bog-standard baked-in application that's practically an afterthought in modern days could open a file that this top-tier premium industry-standard design application choked on.
And you know why?
After over an hour of searching forums, Googling the messages, messing around with the file, messing around with my computer, messing around with Photoshop, and almost resorting to uninstalling & reinstalling the whole application...it turns out the file path was too long for PS to handle. That's it. Not that the file format was bad. Not that it was corrupt or damaged. Not that it suddenly became unsupported. And certainly not because "Photoshop does not recognise this type of file", because as soon as I cut the file name down to just "001.webp" it was magically recognised by Photoshop! Fancy that. No, this was all just because the file path + file name combo was too long, and becasue Adobe's developers coded the most distractingly inaccurate and just plain wrong error message I've seen in recent memory.
Now, I'm not saying directory-structure length limitations aren't a thing, but come on. Those are issues intrinsic to Windows and the deisgn of thier OS which have haunted us for decades, so at this point they're well-known quantities (260 characters, in case anyone's keeping notes) which can and should be easy to identify and call out. Yet I state again that MSPaint had no issue opening the full-fat file path. So this is actually an issue purely on Adobe, for whatever reason, and that means the handling of the issue is also purely on Adobe, including giving us an accurate and actionable error message!
This is Appdev 101 and I can't belive I'm here saying it, but just stating "the file path is too long" or something would have IMMEDIATELY called attention to the issue, allowed me to fix it, saved me an hour of troubleshooting, and never would have necessitated this post. But here we.
So, Adobe.
Please.
PLEASE take this as an opportunity to review your application errors for consistency, accuracy, and veracity. Don't just stop at PS. Do it across your whole suite. This is on the level of amateurishness and/or laziness where unhelpful errors like "Task Failed Successfully" live, and for the amount people are paying you & the trust we've invested in your software, that's beneath you.
Do better.
And for anyone else encountering any of those errors above...hey...try shortening up your file paths and/or file names. That has nothing to do with the actual error, but you never know. You might just get lucky.
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