If you are using one of the latest versions of Photoshop CC, you may notice that at the Home Screen, Photoshop shows a list of your recently opened images, just like the screenshot below.
Well, when working on a personal computer, this seems like a pretty useful option to access the recent files easily.
However, if you are working on a public workstation, or you are sharing the Photoshop app with colleagues, you might not want others to see the files you recently opened.
So for those who don’t want their privacy to be affected through this option in Photoshop, in this post, I’m going to show you how to clear the recently accessed images on your Home Screen or to disable this option altogether.
Let’s take a look.
How to clear recent files in Photoshop
By default, the Photoshop Home Screen will show a total of 20 images that you’ve recently opened. If you’re concerned with your privacy, then the best option would be, of course, to clear them.
To clear all images on your Photoshop Home Screen, go to Files > Open Recent, and choose Clear Recent File List.
This will clear the history of recently accessed images, and return the Home Screen back to a black screen, just like this:
However, this is only going to work until you start opening more image files, and the Home Screen is going to get populated with your recently opened images all over again.
Therefore, this method is only useful if you want to clear your files history for the time being, or to make sure that the next person who uses Photoshop does not know what image files you were working on previously.
How to disable “Recent” in Photoshop
If you want to permanently disable the option to show recent files in Photoshop Homescreen, then try the following method.
Step 1. Go to Photoshop Preferences Settings
For Mac users, go to Photoshop > Preferences > General, or use the shortcut key Command + K. Similarly, for Windows users, go to Edit > Preferences > General, or use the shortcut key Control + K.
Step 2. Change File Handling Settings
Click on“File Handling”on the left sidebar, look for “Recent File List Contains”, and change the default value from “20” to “0”.
This will tell Photoshop to display 0, or no images instead of the default 20 recently accessed images.
Step 3. Disable Home Screen
Last but not least, go back to the General tab in Preferences and uncheck “Auto show the Home Screen”. This will skip showing the Home Screen the next time Photoshop is launched.
