Today’s Question: Is there a way to get rid of the Photoshop Home screen (the one with all the thumbnails) so that the program will just open to a blank workspace?
Tim’s Quick Answer: Yes, you can prevent the Home Screen from showing up by default by turning off the “Auto show the Home Screen” checkbox in Preferences.
More Detail: By default, when you launch Photoshop you’ll see the Home Screen workspace, which presents thumbnails of recently opened images, links to common sources of files, buttons for creating a new file or opening an existing image, and more. I do find this screen distracting, and so I prefer to disable the option to have it appear by default.
You can disable (or enable) the Home Screen display in Preferences. Start by choosing Edit > Preferences > General from the menu on Windows, or Photoshop > Settings > General on Macintosh. On the General tab of the Preferences dialog turn off the “Auto show the Home Screen” checkbox, which is found among a group of checkboxes in the Options section.
If you later decide you want the Home Screen to appear automatically, you can turn on the checkbox instead. Click the OK button to apply the change.
Whether or not you have disabled the automatic display in Preferences, you can bring up the Home Screen on demand at any time by clicking the home button (it is an icon that looks like a small house) at the far left of the Options bar within Photoshop. The Options bar is the context-sensitive toolbar that by default appears at the top of the Photoshop interface, just below the menu or title bar.
