Photoshop 2024: Clearing the “Recent” tab in the “New Document” dialog

First, shout-out to ShineX Media for setting me on the right track for this.

If you use modern versions of Photoshop, you’ve probably noticed that in the “New file…” dialog, there’s a “Recent” tab, which is the default one that comes up. If you’ve been using it to create files in different shapes and sizes and formats, you’ll notice that it gets pretty cluttered up, and it’s easy to accidentally, say, pick something with the right dimensions but wrong DPI and then waste a chunk of time working on an unusable document.

Adobe has provided no built-in way to clear this. People have been asking since 2016 for a solution.

The one documented on the Adobe site, go to the preferences and turn this version of the dialog off, is like the old joke:

• “Doctor, my shoulder hurts when I raise my hand above waist level.”
• “Well…don’t do that.”

I mean, it’s a solution; it’s just not a very reasonable one.

I spent a fair amount of time googling around and finally found a reference to Shine X Media’s video that explains how to do it for Windows; essentially you close Photoshop (very important to keep PS from just rewriting the file again), go looking through the AppData directory for a file named MRU New Doc Sizes (MRU is Most Recently Used), and remove it.

On the Mac, this lives in "${HOME}/Library/Preferences/Adobe Photoshop 2024 Settings/MRU New Doc Sizes.json", and you can simply use the Go… option in the Finder to navigate to the Adobe Photoshop 2024 Settings directory and drag it to the trash.

Again, make sure Photoshop is not running!

This is confirmed to work fine on my 2024 install under Sonoma. Happy and clean open dialogs to you!