Hey all,

This is a little story about a horrible Photoshop experience I just had, and how Dropbox saved the day.

So I was working on this map, slaving away at a variable scale, when something utterly weird and terribly catastrophic happened. "Photoshop crashing?" I hear you think, but noooo, it was far worse than that. Suddenly, and without ANY provocation, some of my text labels started appearing all over the image. Which was actually a smart object within the main map PSD file. I try to select them with the text tool: no succes. I try to single them out by deactivating all layers one by one, and discover they are merged to the background layer. So I think "right, I just need to delete that and replace it with a new layer", but that failed completely! Even removing the layer didn't change a thing. As soon as I re-added a background layer, the text labels re-appeared as well.

So I think: "okay, let's save this thing, close it down and reopen it." But the minute I close the smart object, Photoshop takes me back to the full map... and there the random text labels are as well. Just many, many more of them. I try to single them out again, and horror slowly starts creeping up on me. They're everywhere. In every large group, on several layers. Hardcopied, and un-erasable. delete the layer, create another one, and there they are again.

Now don't go thinking it's just a mask or something. I checked that. I even copied some of the layers to a new image (with no masks, weird channels or whatnot present), and still those damn labels were there.

So I save the document and close Photoshop. I even restart my computer. I even open up the document on another machine. The labels are still there. "Maybe it's just a display thing", I think, so I save the image to JPG, and this is what I get:

Krastvin_20.jpg

Notice that damn grid of roman numerals? Yeah, those originally came from the "variable scale" smart object (in the bottom right). And now they're everywhere! Saving has made it all permanent. I should never have saved it!

And then it hits me. Of course! I do all of this in a Dropbox folder! So I close down Photoshop, go to the Dropbox website, open up the history of my PSD file and restore the most recent version, the save I did right before everything went crazy. And there everything is, taken back to a clean map... All I had to do was redo the work of the last few minutes, and I was back in business.

So this is the lesson of today, sweet children:

save often and do it religiously, but do it in a folder that keeps all older versions as well. Dropbox does that, but so do several others (OneDrive, Google Drive etc etc). If ever you do something terribly stupid AND save your mistake, Dropbox or its alternatives are there to come to the rescue.

The more you know