Workspace lock and rollback for Photoshop power users

Designers who have memorized tool locations by muscle memory — people who've used Photoshop daily for 5–10 years — describe a specific, enraging experience: they update, open a project, and reach for a tool that isn't where it was. Complaints describe this as 'having to re-learn where things are' and 'Adobe rearranges the toolbar and does away with necessary tools.' The deeper frustration is that there's no sanctioned way to say 'freeze my interface exactly as it is and insulate me from Adobe's layout decisions.'

Adobe has structural reasons not to solve this cleanly. Their business depends on users seeing and adopting new features — a frozen UI is the opposite of that. So they offer workspace saving, which saves panel positions but doesn't protect against Adobe overwriting or deprecating those panels in the next release. That's a fundamentally different problem than the one users are complaining about.

What's missing is something that runs outside Adobe's control: a persistent layer that backs up a user's full workspace configuration — panel layouts, toolbar arrangements, custom keyboard shortcuts, saved workspaces, plugin states — and can restore an exact prior state after an Adobe update blows it away. Users currently describe manually rebuilding workspaces after every major update, or keeping CS6 installed in parallel specifically to avoid this.

This recurs every update cycle indefinitely. A freelance retoucher or senior photo editor who bills hourly cannot absorb the cost of a half-day workspace rebuild every few months. The alternative — staying on an old version — creates its own compatibility problems with clients sending newer file formats. Neither option is acceptable, which is why someone will pay to eliminate both.

What to build

Build a desktop app for Mac and Windows that snapshots a user's complete Photoshop workspace state (keyboard shortcuts JSON, toolbar XML, panel layout files, workspace presets) before each Adobe update and restores it in one click after the update installs, with a version history of every prior state.

Where to start

Launch specifically for keyboard shortcut backup and restore only — the narrowest, most universally complained-about piece, with the simplest file format to parse — then expand to full panel and toolbar layout once the update-cycle workflow is established with early customers.

The hard part

Adobe's internal file formats for workspace configuration are undocumented and change between major versions, meaning a snapshot taken under CC 2023 may not map cleanly to CC 2024's file structure — requiring ongoing reverse-engineering work with every Adobe release.

How it makes money

One-time purchase of $49 with a paid upgrade every two years, matching Adobe's major release cadence — simple enough that a solo freelancer buys it without needing budget approval.