Prevailing wisdom is to keep all 3rd-party plugins in their own folder, and name it something like, ummm "3rd Party Plugins" or something. 🙂
You can keep this anywhere that’s convenient for you.
Then, in Photoshop’s preferences, you just point to that folder in the Plugins and Scratch Disk preferences panel.
There’s no need to duplicate that folder full of plugins, or to install them twice. Just point to that custom folder full from the preferences panel from each version of Photoshop.
The additional plug-ins folder can be located anywhere; consistent with the Windows scheme of putting stuff that’s specific to your operations either in My Documents (or a subfolder) or in Documents and Settings\Application Data\…, rather than in just a plain folder off the file system, I’ve created a subdirectory tree in My Documents named Adobe. One folder in that is for plug-ins.
I do the same for other stuff, such as actions, brushes, etc. Make a folder for particular types of files under My Documents\Adobe. That way they will be easy to locate if the "load" dialog for the file type isn’t "sticky".
Actions are not so easy shareable as Plug-ins.
If you have made most of you actions in CS2 (I guess), you can find your actions library (and more custom files) in a directory something like this (by default):
C:\Documents and Settings\<YourName>\Application Data\Adobe\Photoshop\9.0\Adobe Photoshop CS2 Settings\
Actions are: Actions Palette.psp
You can copy this file to a custom directory of CS3 – somthing like this: C:\Documents and Settings\<YourName>\Application Data\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS3\Adobe Photoshop CS3 Settings\
and you will get a copy of your CS2 actions in CS3.
Remember, if you have made new actions in CS3, by copying actions from CS2, all your new CS3 actions will be lost.
Actions are not so easy shareable as Plug-ins.
Sure they are. You can load .atn files from any location, BUT…
I would much rather simply Save action sets as .atn files, from the Actions palette. That makes them easily portable from version to version and machine to machine. IMHO, easier to deal with than the preferences (.psp) file.
If you put your saved actions and other presets in the appropriate Presets folders in Photoshop they will appear on the flyout arrow menu for easy loading.
Agree. Actions are easily portable, but not shareable.
By "actions are not easily shareable as plug-ins" I meant (in case of installing new unexplored or beta version) that in PS preferences you can select "Additional plug-ins folder" as "Plug-Ins" folder of good old PS version which you can rely on 🙂
Actions are easily portable, but not shareable.
yes they are easily shareable too. you save out your actions as ed says, to something like DavesActions.atn. I give you the file. you place it ANYwhere on your computer. in the action palette you select the flyout menu and choose Load Actions and browse to that location and select the file. You now have access to the action i saved.
I have 2 folders, one called c:\myActions one called c:\myPlugins. all my custom actions go in the one folder and all my 3rd party plugins go in another. when upgrading i point the 2ndary plugins folder loc to c:\myPlugins and go into the actions palette and load my custom actions from c:\myActions.
same holds true for all other user savable stuff. patterns, swatches, brush sets, etc.
The comment "Actions are easily portable, but not shareable." has to close to the stupidist thing I have heard. If they can easily be moved from one computer to another or one copy of Photoshop to another (that is the portable part of the comment) then they are easy to share because instead of putting on another computer you give it to friends.
Robert
Robert, my English isn’t that perfect, but are we talking in Swahili though? Portable is portable while shareable is shareable.
Portable means transferable. Right?
Shareable means common, jointly used. Right again?
Shareable means not only you can easily share it with your friends 😉 Example. If you have installed two versions of PS (PS2 and PS3) on one computer you won’t be able to have actions jointly used, you should move it (save in one version and load in another); in case of changes you’ll have to save and load again, save and load etc… That means actions are not usable jointly (shareable) in two versions – they are transferrable (portable) from version to version.
Imagine one day you’ve made changes of some action in PS2, then switched to PS3 and surprisingly noticed that actions palette in PS3 are automatically refreshed! And no headache of "Oh, I have forgotten to unload last action and have to close active PS version and start another…". That would be cool if they would be shareable that way, yes? But they are not.
You can easily share action sets (.atn files) between multiple versions of Photoshop. Just load the same action set in the actions pallette of each version of Photoshop. When you click to load, you get a file navigator, so just navigate to where your .atn files are located. Putting the .atn files in a single place makes this easy, and the location is "sticky," so you only have to navigate once in each app.
