Today’s Question: With a recent Photoshop update, when my mouse is over a tool on the toolbox I get a large popup with a video in it. Is there a way to disable this popup?
Tim’s Quick Answer: You can disable these animated “tooltips” by turning off the “Use Rich Tooltips” checkbox on the Tools page of the Preferences dialog. You can also turn off the standard tooltips by turning off the “Show Tooltips” checkbox on the same page.
More Detail: Tooltips are intended to provide contextual information within a software application. Within Photoshop, for example, the standard tooltips will indicate the name of a tool when you hover your mouse over the button for that tool, along with an indication of the keyboard shortcut for the tool.
While these tooltips can certainly be helpful when you’re initially learning a software application such as Photoshop, they can also be a bit distracting. With the Photoshop CC 2018 update, Adobe added a “rich tooltips” option, which displays an animation demonstrating the basic use of a tool, along with the name of the tool, the keyboard shortcut, and a brief description.
The rich tooltips are controlled by the “Use Rich Tooltips” checkbox on the Tools page of the Preferences dialog. You can get to that page by going to the menu and choosing Edit > Preferences > Tools in the Windows version of Photoshop, or by choosing Photoshop > Preferences > Tools in the Macintosh version. With the “Use Rich Tooltips” checkbox turned on you will see the “rich” version of tooltips, and with it turned off you will see the standard version.
Of course, if you prefer to turn off tooltips altogether, there is an option for that as well. Simply turn off the “Show Tooltips” checkbox on the Tools page of the Preferences dialog, and you won’t see any tooltips at all within Photoshop (rich or otherwise).