Ever get so caught up in your Photoshop work that you forget to save regularly? Or even at all? Have you ever remembered just when something horrible happens, like, oh, I don’t know, Photoshop crashes? I’ve had all this happen, more often than I’d like to admit! I’ve lost probably the equivalent to days and days – weeks?- worth of work due to lack of diligence in saving my work. I don’t mean it to happen, I just get so wrapped up with what I’d doing, that I just forget! Frankly, I despair of ever being disciplined enough to save faithfully!
The reason Adobe hasn’t seen fit to add an autosave feature to any version of Photoshop is that, supposedly, it would inhibit creativity. Personally, nothing inhibits my creativity more than losing all the creativity I’ve just created! Additionally, I have an answer for the “inhibits creativity” crowd: the ability to turn autosave on or off…need I say “Duh”? Frankly, if Adobe won’t add an auto save feature to Photoshop, you’d think some enterprising soul would!
Behold! The answer to my prayer! Electric Iris, a 3D application developer with deep roots in film, television, games and design came up with a very simple, yet simply brilliant little plug-in called psdAutoSave, and save it does! Simple in every sense of the word, you simply download psdAutoSave, tell it you want to install it into what ever version of Photoshop you’re running (it works from version 7 up to CS4) and that’s it!
When you start Photoshop, just follow this menu path: File > Automate > psdSaver-Preferences. A menu will come up that will allow you to choose how often you want to save, from every minute to every 3 hours. You can also choose just where you want the saved files to go, whether in the folder the file was initially saved in or a new one, and from one to three history versions of the file. Oh, and if you decide you’re on too big of a creativity wave to bother having to pause every hour for the file to save, you can disable the autosave function from the same interface.
The only complaint I have about the whole process is that there’s no contact information for Electric Iris, apparently anywhere on the planet. I’m odd that way, and like to know I can zip an email off to a company if I should need to ask a question. However, there is a support forum for all the Electric Iris products, so I suppose my concern is somewhat negated.
System requirements needed to run this plug-in are Photoshop versions 7 thru CS4, 256 MB of memory, a 1 GHz or larger Pentium processor and a three button mouse (although, I must confess I have yet to figure out why). The bad news is it seems to only be available for systems running Windows, and only Windows 2000 and XP at that. Can’t figure that one out, either. psdAutoSave costs $19.95 for a single license which enables one user to use the product on up to two machines. A small price to pay for invaluable piece of mind!
- Price: $19.95
- Developer: Electic Iris
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Hello Erik,
Thank you for the write up on psdAutoSaver, especially the questions and concerns. Yes, we need to put our contact information on the website more clearly (our email is enzo@electriciris.com for questions and concerns, and the support forum, like you mentioned).
The system requirements need to be updated as well. Yes, there is no Mac version yet, but psdAutoSaver runs on any version of Windows that Photoshop runs on, and a three button mouse isn’t required (we’ll correct that on the website).
Keep up the good work!
Enzo
Thanks for the reply! Clears things up and adds a lot! I’m definitely looking forward to the Mac version!
From my personal experience the Electric Iris guys are brilliant! I ask for features or even a product and they develop it perfectly, their ingenuity has put me ahead of my deadlines in many ways. The psdAutoSaver plug-in is just the latest.