Today’s Question: I just got a new laptop and loaded Photoshop onto it. I saved two images from Photoshop, thinking they would go to my external hard drive as usual. However, when I tried to open them, I can’t find them. When I look at the “Save As” dialog, it looks like the only choice is to save to the cloud. How do you find images if they got saved to the cloud?
Tim’s Quick Answer: You can locate recently saved images by choosing File > Open Recent from the menu. To save files to your computer rather than the Adobe Creative Cloud servers, click the “On your computer” button at the bottom-left of the Save As dialog.
More Detail: Photoshop enables you to save files to the Adobe Creative Cloud, which means the files will be saved on Adobe’s servers through the internet rather than on a local hard drive that you manage. However, you can still save files locally rather than to the cloud.
When the Save As dialog is configured to save to the cloud, you’ll see an indication of “Cloud Documents” toward the top-left of the Save As dialog. In this case you will also see an “On your computer” button at the bottom-left of the dialog. You can click that button to switch to the standard Save As dialog where you can navigate to a location on your computer where you want to save the file.
If you prefer to save to Cloud Documents so you can open your files from any computer that is connected to the Internet and on which you have signed in with your Adobe Creative Cloud account, make sure you’re in the Cloud Documents version of the Save As dialog. In the standard Save As dialog you’ll see a “Save to cloud documents” button toward the bottom-center of the dialog, which you can click to switch to the Cloud Documents version of the Save As dialog.
And, as noted above, if you’re not sure where you saved a recent file you can choose File > Open Recent from the menu to see a list of the files you’ve most recently saved.