Texture Actions: What would you do here?

I have created an Action set for a series of Photoshop files that will be burned to CD for others to use. Some of these Actions make use of Textures, both those built into Photoshop (Cracquelure, Sandstone, Brick, Burlap and Canvas) plus those that ship in the PS Textures folder. Additionally, I have created some textures of my own.

The problem comes in creating Texture Actions to to be run on volumes different than the actual hard drive on which the Action was originally created. When you create an Action that accesses a file (such as a texture .psd), Photoshop remembers and looks for the file on the specific hard drive on which the Action was recorded. If you load that Action set onto another computer, PS can't find the volume and gives an error message. The really awkward runaround is to have the person at the other computer re-create the Action exactly as recorded and throw away the original Action. Not a fun user experience.

I thought I had a solution to this problem by burning a CD with all the files and Actions on it, then re-recording the Actions with that CD inserted, this time using the .psd's on the CD as the reference files. I assumed Photoshop would look for that volume (the CD), and as long as my Master CD was named the same, and the Textures folder nested in the same position, it would work.

And work it did - up to a point. I inserted the new CD, and the Actions ran fine. When I ejected the CD, I got error messages, which I expected to get. No CD, no Action. So far, so good.

So I saved this new Action set to the Master CD files and burned another Master CD exactly the same as the original (with the new Action set replacing the old being the only change).

From this new master CD I installed the files onto a different computer, loaded the Action set, inserted the CD. However, when I clicked open the Actions there was a "File Not Found" error message.

It appears that something happened when the Action set was saved to a new .atn file, but I'm really not sure, as I was able to get it to work before I saved the set and reloaded it.

Any Action gurus ready to take this one on?

TIA.

John Hartman

By "burned another Master CD" do you mean you just copied the files as you did originally, copying the action file to the CD as well? Or making a copy OF the CD? For all intents and purposes, if you make a copy of the CD (most burning software will let you copy from the same CD drive, then burn to a new disc with an exact copy (it saves the files on the HDD, then uses those to "recreate" the CD). If you did the first, and not the second, that is probably what caused the problem. However, if you made a direct "carbon copy" of the CD using your burning software, then I guess there is no reason why it shouldn't work. Try the ActionXchange... The guys there could probably help you out if someone else here doesn't know.