Group your layers to get organized

Submitted by Ivan on Sun, 2006-08-13 07:12.

grouping layers When I work in Photoshop I quickly end up having dozens of layers. It's good to keep every possible thing on it's on layer, but at the same time it becomes increasingly difficult to navigate them. Thankfully Photoshop allows us to group our layers into layer folders.

The quickest way to get organized is to just select all the layers that belong to each other and simply drag them into the folder icon on the bottom of the layer palette. This operation will create a new folder and places all the layers into it. Next, name the folder, so you know what it contains.

In my normal workflow I keep adding new layers for every element of my layout and when I feel a certain object with it's all layers is complete, I just group them into a folder and get them out of the way. If the number of such folders becomes big, you can further simplify your document by either coloring the folders to get a better overview or grouping the folders themselves into higher level folders. I think Photoshop CS2 has an unlimited depth of folders. Of course the deeper you go the more clicking you need to do if you want to expand the structure.

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Useful tip

Submitted by janeiro on Sun, 2006-08-13 13:36.

Juste want to mention that instead of drag elements, I select them and do cmd + G shortcut to group them in a folder.

Concerning depth of folders, if I remember correctly it seem limited to 7 deeps

Ciao

Great tip Ivan!

Submitted by Fraijanes on Sun, 2006-08-13 19:46.

Hy Buddy! Thanks for the tip, this is great when we are doing and a large layiout and we have a lot of layers, this is a light in the middle of darkness...
Later

Caya

We´ll always have Paris! Humphrey Bogart

Best thing in CS2

Submitted by train on Tue, 2006-08-15 16:36.

I recently switched to CS2 and found the layer linking and organization to be the best improvement.

Caveat

Submitted by michaud on Wed, 2006-08-16 13:28.

When you try to select a layer with the move tool and ctrl+click, the behavior is pretty unpredictable: Folders jump open and the folder is selected instead of the layer. In windwos atleast that's a real pain in the a##

turn off the group select

Submitted by Daniel M on Thu, 2006-08-17 14:13.

I can't remember the name of the checkbox at this moment and I don't have PS in front of me, but select the move tool.
In the options toolbar, uncheck the checkbox for the group layer selection and when you ctrl/cmd-click the group is not selected but rather the individual layers.

best way i have found

Submitted by cbrophy78 on Wed, 2006-08-16 15:07.

is selecting a whole bunch of layers to group and shift+click on the new group icon. And even better is to alt+shift+click on the same icon and it brings up the naming option of the group.

What does this button d.... CRAP!

CS2 only

Submitted by mijlee on Wed, 2006-08-23 06:14.

This tecgnique is great but is only made easy in CS2. In CS and below you have to move the layers one by one which is a real pain.

What I tend to do is have the folder structure ready before I begin my layout. This is especially necessary when I'm doing a multi page web design document. Each content area will have it's own layer so I keep everything in the same file so that it makes making changes to the global nav etc easier to manage.

Also just tried the grouping tip and it did indeed group my layers but at the same time made them invisible? Does it not work with Shape Layers?

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