Why are my saved grids gone?

If you’ve update from GuideGuide 5 to one of the 2023 (or later) versions, you’ve probably noticed that your saved grids have disappeared. Don’t fret, though, they’re still there. Check out this guide for how to migrate your old data.

If you just want your data back, that’s all you need to know. If you want to understand why it works this way…

Why it works like this

GuideGuide 5 saves data in a specific location that was intended as a centralized storage spot for any GuideGuide plugin you have installed to access. For the most part, any GuideGuide 5 plugin could read that file so your data “synced” between your plugins.

In the years since I built those plugins, best practices related to customer data privacy have changed and improved. One of those changes is the idea of sandboxing — keeping thrid-party code (what GuideGuide is to Photoshop) limited to smaller areas of your computer so that plugins can only operate within the specific permissions users give them. This is overall a good thing, but it means that GuideGuide can’t automatically find and import its old data.

When I built GuideGuide for this new format of sandboxed plugins, I had to make a decision: ask each new install if they have old data to import or just ignore it entirely. On the scale of time, there will ideally be more people using newer versions of GuideGuide than people that use GuideGuide 5. In fact, even people that use GuideGuide 5 will only have to update once, so even those people are a dwindling number.

Rather than force everyone going forward to be asked a question that will slowly become less relevant over time, I decided to take the forward looking approach: ignore old data and provide a guide for how to get it.