• Secret Photoshop feature won’t open images with certain filenames

    PUBLIC DEFENDER

    Brian Livingston

    By Brian Livingston

    An undocumented feature of Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and related programs makes the applications open but fail to load an image — and the apps then close abruptly — if you launch the apps using a filename with specific characters, according to numerous licensed users.

    This weird behavior, which is either an inadvertent bug or a deliberate Easter egg programmed in by some Adobe developer, can be seen on releases of the software all the way back to Photoshop version 5 (1998) and through Photoshop 23.2.2.325, which is the current version in Adobe’s Creative Cloud 2022.

    Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.14.0, 2022-04-04).