Alt + Click does not delete swatch

[Poetepoet]

Hello and good evening!

I'm fairly new to Photoshop, and today I found the need to work with Swatches. There was no option to just clear all swatches, so I wanted to do it one by one. Figuring this could be done faster, did some research and found the Alt+Click shortcut mentioned several times.

Now, going back to Photoshop CC 2018, I try and nothing happens. It just selects the colour from the swatch. No scissor cursor, no swatch deleted. It just won't work. What is causing this simple shortcut not to function? When I press Alt I do seem to highlight the top menu bar (File, Edit, etc...)

If anyone can help me fix this, I'll be extremely grateful

-Lars

[Luka_2711]

Hello Lars ,

You are right in Photoshop CC 2018 when we are pressing ALT + Click , its not deleting any of the swatches.

I checked the same in the previous version of the application Photoshop CC 2017 and it was working fine.

So , for now you can switch back to the previous version of the application.

While we will check why its not working in the new Photoshop CC 2018.

Thanks

Lakshay

[Poetepoet]

Thanks for the response! Reverting back to 2017 would be a big action just for an empty swatch manager, so I manually deleted them one by one and saved the blank one for the future.

Thanks for looking into it!

[Barb Binder · Accepted solution]

Hello Lars:

That shortcut isn't working for me, either. But you don't have to return to an earlier version of Photoshop. You can either right+click a swatch and choose Delete Swatch, or drag it to the Trash can in the lower right corner of the Swatches panel.

Alternatively since the original plan was to delete all the swatches, just use the Preset Mgr in the Swatches panel menu. You can select multiple swatches using Shift (consecutive) and Control (non-consecutive), then save the set.

~Barb

[Poetepoet]

Thanks for that last suggestion, makes clearing swatches quite a tad faster. Hopefully they will reimplement Alt+Click soon.

[Kukurykus]

They won't bring it back as what I read too many users deleted swatches by mistake (holding for some reason ALT hovring swatches panel). I was looking such topics and couldn't find anyone who reported it, also I couldn't imagine how anyone (actually so many users?) could delete swatch without intention, and why alt was hold at this time, I mean what it was pressed for then? In my opinion it's another change they didn't give alternative for, like checkbox in preferences

[Alicia Hart]

This is not an effective technique for deleting multiple swatches it is too time-consuming - Adobe products are getting worse - the increased lack of basic functionality is becoming an increasing problem - they just keep adding on unnecessary layers of junk and it messes up core functions that designers rely on...

[clareb4925789]

Just had the same problem found your reply useful as i have managed to do what I could do previously, normally a way around it its just finding it so thank you  

[Barb Binder]

Glad to help, Clare.

~Barb

[gener7]

Ctrl + clicking (possibly Windows right mouse click) on a swatch, brings up Delete Swatch as a context menu choice.

And if you do select Delete, you get the "Are you sure? OK/Cancel" dialog.

Not the original question, but just to show you still can delete a swatch from the panel.

[Trevor.Dennis]

I'm wondering if we are misunderstanding you.  There's no reason to delete swatches as such, but you might want to remove them from the Swatch panel.  Thatr's easy to do.  If you have appended additional swatches, and end up with something like this:

Just reset the swatches

And chose OK rather than Append, and you are back to the default.

[Poetepoet]

My goal was to start with a blank swatch manager. My options were:

• drag each individual swatch to the bin in the bottom right (repetitive operation)
• Right click, delete, confirm (for about 50 swatches, that takes a while)

Resetting to default would just fill up the swatch manager back up with swatches I don't want. But thanks for your help!

[Trevor.Dennis]

When you say 'swatch' do you mean an individual colour, or a swatch set?

You need one swatch to create a new set, so open the Preset Manager > Swatches,  select a colour (it doesn't matter what it is) and Save the set with your new custom name.

If using Windows, find the new set in

C:\Users\your use name\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CC 2018

and copy it to:

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CC 2018\Presets\Color Swatches

You might need to restart Photoshop, but you will then be able to open your custom set with the single swatch ready to be populated.

I don't know if that moves you closer to where you want to be.  If not, perhaps you can explain in more detail why you need to do this?  If you are working in digital art, then we generally tend to create our colour palette inside the document area on its own layer.  This is convenient because we can drag it to were we are working and alt pick colors from it.

[John8495]

This solution worked great, thanks a lot.

[maxgardnersw]

Actually, this is helpful (though the solution isn't mentioned directly in this post). From this screen, you can use Cmd-A to select all of them, then click the "Delete" button on the right-hand side to clear all swatches. It's poor UX, but it works.

[PECourtejoie]

Hello, did you report it on https://feedback.photoshop.com ?

[joolsh]

Thank you very much this should be at the top of Google search.

[Jeff Arola]

Seems this was a deliberate decision by adobe to take away the Alt/Option click to Delete a Swatch in the Swatches panel.

Photoshop CC 2018: Restore shortcut for deleting swatches by alt+click (win) opt+click (macOS) | Pho...

[Ice_Cell]

The Preset Manager is helpful for editing a mass of swatches, but removing the alt+click shortcut is not intuitive if I already have the palette I want and would simply like to remove a single swatch or two.

I'm currently using CC 2019 and the shortcut's still missing.