Photoshop Tip – How to turn off “Add Copy to Copied Layers and Groups”

If, like me, you have been frustrated with Photoshop’s annoying little habit of appending “copy” to the end of every layer or layer group you duplicate then you will be pleased to know that you can now turn it of in CS5 and CS4.

If you happen to find this feature useful, essential or just plain don’t care then feel free to scroll through my other blog posts while you’re here :grin:.

Sometimes it’s amazing how the little things can be such a pain to deal with, either constantly renaming layers or putting up with nasty little “copy” tags all over the place became very annoying.

So one of the first things I did when running up Photoshop CS5 was to attempt to turn off this somewhat annoying feature (which is still enabled by default).

I searched the preferences screens multiple times, reading each page more and more carefully but to no avail. Damn you Adobe, you just couldn’t make it easy could you 😥

Photoshop CS5 - Layers Panel Options

Anyway, I eventually found it nestled in the Layers Panel drop down menu. Maybe CS6 will manage to consolidate all the programs options into one central located, we can only hope 🙂

The Solution (CS5)

1. Click on the dropdown menu to the right of the Layers Panel
2. Select Panel Options near the bottom and you’ll get the “Layers Panel Options” window up (see right)
3. Look at the bottom of the “Layers Panel Options” window to see where Adobe have hidden this little treasure
4. Titled “Add ‘copy’ to Copied Layers and Groups” the new checkbox will default to ticked, simply untick it to enable one of the most powerful changes in Photoshop CS5 😎

Now don’t get me started on their inconsistent use of the undo command across all of the various utilities and functions, maybe we’ll have to wait for CS9 to fix that one …

The Solution (CS4)
It has been pointed out to me that John Nack has posted information about a fix for this problem in Photoshop CS4. Click here to read John’s post