From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

944 Clearing the Photoshop Home screen

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

944 Clearing the Photoshop Home screen

- [Instructor] Hey gang. This is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques, today is more of a trick than a technique, multiple tricks, really. But whatever you call 'em, they're mighty good, believe you me. Now, assuming that you're working inside a recent version of Photoshop I'm about to show you how to clear away all the thumbnails from your homescreen. Both permanently by choosing a command and temporarily in a way that will I'll hide all your thumbnails. Let's say when you leave your desk, so none of your clients or coworkers or kids conspire on your work and then restore every single one of them, when you come back. How are such things possible? Here, let me show you. Alright, So here we are looking at the Photoshop home screen which by default appears anytime no images open, inside Photoshop. Notice, I've also clicked on the home item up here in the top left corner, not one of these other options. In which case I'll see thumbnails for each of my recently opened images in the order that I've opened them. So in other words the most recently opened images first and so forth. These same files are represented up here in a file menu. You dropped down to open recent and you'll see a list of files, like so, if you want to clear this list as well as all of the thumbnails then you choose this command, clear recent file list that just clears the thumbnails. It does not actually delete the images or anything dangerous like that. Now you probably already knew all of that which is why I'm going to show you a couple of things that perhaps you did not know. First of all, you can go to the edit menu here on a PC. That's going to be the Photoshop menu on the Mac drop down to the preferences command and then choose this command right here, file handling. Or if you're crazy for keyboard shortcuts then just go ahead and press Control K, followed by Control six and it's Control six, because file handling is the sixth item in this left-hand list. On a Mac that's Command K Command six and then you drop down to this option right here. Recent File List Contains, in my case 30 files. If I set it to zero files like so, and then click OK, that's going to temporarily clear the open recent list right here. In this particular version of Photoshop, it does not have any effect on the thumbnails that you see here inside the home screen. And incidentally, by the way you can change that value on the fly. So notice right now I'm seeing no files in the open recent sub menu. However, if I press Control K Control six again on a Mac that's Command K Command six and I changed this value to let's say 10 files and then click OK. Then if I go to the file menu and choose open recent I'm going to see a list of the last 10 files I opened. And you can raise that value by the way, once again Control K Control, six Command K Command six on the Mac. And then if I were to crank this value not to 20 which is the setting by default, but let's say you want Photoshop to remember more files going forward. Then I'll just go ahead and crank that value up to 50 files. It doesn't hurt anything and then click OK. And now notice if I go to the file menu and choose open recent, I have a longer list of files. In my case, they're numbered zero through 25 at least here in the PC. You probably won't see those numbers on the Mac but that tells me I have opened a total of 26 files since I last chose clear recent file list. Alright, I'm going to escape out and now let me show you one more trick. This is a way to temporarily clear all of your thumbnails here on the home screen. Just go over to this filter item right there and enter something like A A A. None of my file names contain three A's in a row. And so what that does is it temporarily clears those recently opened thumbnails. Even though they still appear up here in the open recent sub menu. That's something to bear in mind. And then what I would do if I were leaving my desk, for example and I didn't necessarily want to share my history with everybody in the building, then I would just click on the PSI icon right there in the top left corner of the screen to switch back to Photoshop. And that way, even if somebody knows to click on the home icon to bring back that home screen they won't see any files. As long as this filter is set to A A A. When you come back to your desk and you want to bring back those thumbnails, just click on this little cancel button in order to clear that filter field and that my friends is how you clear your thumbnails from the home screen both permanently using the Clear Recent File List command or temporarily just by entering some crazy combination of letters. Even A A works. In my case here, inside the filter field. If you're a member of LinkedIn learning, I have a followup movie in which I show you how to hide a single specific thumbnail on Photoshops home screen. Not all of them, just one or two or as many as you like, works inside illustrator as well. These techniques each and every week, keep watching.

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