Autosave & recovery
How PhotoFresco protects unsaved work locally, restores interrupted sessions, and differs from saving a PSD or document.
PhotoFresco protects open work with a local crash-recovery autosave. It is a safety net for an interrupted browser session, not a replacement for saving a PSD or a document in My Documents.
What autosave does
- After about five seconds without an edit, PhotoFresco saves the changed document state to private storage in the same browser on the same device.
- It waits for an active brush stroke, drag, or other pointer action to finish, then writes in browser idle time so it does not interrupt editing.
- It saves only the parts that changed, rather than rewriting the whole canvas every time.
- The local recovery copy contains document pixels, layer structure, masks, layer styles, guides, paths, saved selections, and other document settings. Nothing is uploaded just because it was autosaved.
- PhotoFresco keeps up to six autosave slots. A document open in another tab is never treated as a recovery candidate or removed.
Autosave depends on modern browser private storage. It is unavailable in browsers that do not support that storage, and clearing PhotoFresco's site data removes its local recovery copies.
Recover work after an interruption
If a browser tab crashes, the browser quits, or the last session ends before you save, open PhotoFresco again on the same browser and device. Your unsaved documents reopen automatically, each in its own tab — no dialog to click through.
A brief notice confirms what came back — "Restored unsaved document…" — with a Discard button in case you didn't want that work back. Discard closes the restored tabs and permanently removes their recovery copies. If the notice disappears before you act, nothing is lost: the restored documents are simply open, and you can close or keep them like any other tab.
Save each restored document when you are ready: use File ▸ Save for a PSD, or File ▸ Save to My Documents for PhotoFresco's local document library.
Restored work opens as unsaved. It is not silently written over a file on your disk or in My Documents.
What recovery cannot restore
Recovery restores the document itself, but it deliberately does not restore:
- Undo/redo history or the History Brush snapshot.
- The live selection's marching ants.
- Temporary editor chrome such as panel multi-selection and the active channel.
An explicit Close in PhotoFresco that you confirm as discarding unsaved changes removes that document's recovery copy. A document that is still open in another browser tab is never treated as a recovery candidate, so it is never restored twice.
Autosave, My Documents, PSD, and cloud sync
| Feature | Where it lives | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Autosave | Private browser storage on this device | Short-term crash recovery for open, unsaved work |
| My Documents | Your browser's local document library | A named, durable local copy that you choose to save |
| PSD Save | A file on your disk | A layered file you can keep, share, or reopen in Photoshop-compatible software. In Chrome and Edge, File ▸ Save writes back to the same file each time (the first save asks where); in other browsers each save downloads a fresh copy |
| Cloud sync | Your PhotoFresco cloud drive | An additional copy for ad-free subscribers after a document has been explicitly saved and linked to the cloud |
For an ad-free subscriber, a cloud-linked document is refreshed after local autosaves, no more often than about once a minute. Scratch documents never create a cloud entry on their own. Local autosave always happens first; it does not need the network or an account.
For the broader privacy and offline model, see the FAQ and PSD import & export.
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