History palette states disappeared.

FM
Posted By
Fred_Morris
Apr 29, 2004
Views
251
Replies
10
Status
Closed
According to the online Photoshop manual, dragging a History state to the trash will delete that state and all that follow without changing the image. In experiments, I have found that that is not necessarily true nor have I been able to find a pattern. Sometimes it behaves as expected and sometimes the results are very strange. I have found that dragging the state immediately ABOVE the final state to the trash very often clears the entire history AND destroys the image. What’s going on? A fellow worker lost two hours’ work and now none of us trust the History palette.
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disappear history palette state

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B
Buko
Apr 29, 2004
If you want to clear the history pallette why not use edit > purge
PC
Pierre_Courtejoie
Apr 29, 2004
I never experienced the same thing, but I’m an user from the dark side…

buko, it seems that Fred tries to selectively purge the history, to a certain point…

Fred, could you elaborate? what (deleted)steps does cause this? Do you use a non-linear history?
EH
Ed_Hannigan
Apr 29, 2004
Seems to work as it should for me. I am not clear on why you would need to trash History states. It can be undone if disaster strikes.

You can make snapshots if you are unsure. Or select Non-linear History.

But I’d like to know why you need to trash History states.
R
Ram
Apr 29, 2004
Ed,

I’m glad you asked that question. Ever since reading the original post I’ve been puzzled as to why anyone would ever want or need to do that.
FM
Fred_Morris
May 4, 2004
I teach at a school where we train adults for careers in graphic design. Of course Photoshop is one of the applications we use, and our students are very good at discovering ways to make it work wrong. The problem I tried to describe was presented to me by one of our students. Build a Photoshop file containing several states. Open the History palette and start dragging earlier states to the trash. According to the manual, the state you trash — and all the states below it — will be discarded while leaving the image alone. (I don’t know either why anyone would want to do this.) Anyhow… sometimes this doesn’t work. In a worst-case scenario, the image and all the states are lost.

Aside from telling the student not to do that any more, I’m curious to know WHY it happened. I can’t always reproduce the effect, but if I try long enough, all the states eventually disappear and sometimes the image disappears along with them. It’s not supposed to do that. Why does it? If there’s no need to delete states then why is there a trash can? I rarely use the History palette, so I have very little experience with it. This has me stumped.

We’re using OS 10.2.6. Thanks for any help you can provide.
B
Buko
May 4, 2004
where is that Chris Cox when we need him B)
R
Ram
May 4, 2004
Fred,

I used to be one of those smart-aleck students like that in elementary school well over half a century ago; my teachers hated me for it. Fortunately, I outgrew it.

You have my sympathy.
EH
Ed_Hannigan
May 4, 2004
You may be misreading the Help files:

"Click the name of the state, and choose Delete from the History palette menu to delete that change and those that came after it.

"Drag the state to the Trash button to delete that change and those that came after it. Choose Clear History from the palette menu to delete the list of states from the History palette, without changing the image. This option doesn’t reduce the amount of memory used by Photoshop.

"Hold down Alt (Windows) or Option (Mac OS), and choose Clear History from the palette menu to purge the list of states from the History palette without changing the image.

"If you get a message that Photoshop is low on memory, purging states is useful, since the command deletes the states from the Undo buffer and frees up memory. You can’t undo the Clear History command. "

The "without changing the image" refers to the Clear History command, NOT to dragging History states to the trash icon.
J
jeremyschultz
May 4, 2004
I use the History palette quite a bit, but never use it to delete states. I like it for the Art History brush and as a way to multiple undo.

You may want to see if your students have checked the "Allow Non-Linear History" in the History palette options. This actually allows users to pull out selected history without deleting anything else. Unfortunately I can’t recreate what you’re describing, but maybe non-linear history is at the root of it anyway.

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F
Fatos
May 4, 2004
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