How do you stop Photoshop saving to Creative Cloud?

Barry Collins

Sep 2

Adobe Photoshop gets a little more irritating with every release, with its dogged attempts to make you save files to Creative Cloud. If paying Adobe £50 a month for its software wasn't bad enough, it wants to take my files hostage in its cloud too. No thanks. How do you stop Photoshop saving to Creative Cloud? Follow the guide below.

Stop Photoshop offering Creative Cloud as a save location

By default, when you go to save a file in the latest version of Photoshop, you'll see a box like this:

There is an option to save files 'on your computer' tucked at the bottom of the window, as highlighted by the red arrow, but the default option is to 'save to Creative Cloud', as you can see at the top of the screenshot.

To prevent this screen from appearing and to go back to a regular Mac/Windows save dialog box, you need to do the following:

Mac

Click Photoshop in the Menu Bar at the top of the screen, then select Preferences > File Handling and select On your computer from the drop-down menu next to Default file location, as shown below. The click OK.

Once you do this, the next time you attempt to save a new file, you'll see the following screen, with a local save now the default:

Windows

The process is very similar in the Windows version of Photoshop.

Here you click Edit at the top of the Photoshop window and select Preferences > File Handling > File Saving Options. Again, choose On your computer from the drop-down menu next to Default file location, then hit OK.

Now you've cleared those Creative Clouds!