u/Big_Rip4015

One of the (many) annoying things about Phocus 4.x for Mac as I'm sure many of you have discovered, is that if you apply one of those presets from "Adjustments" dropdown, once you've saved it, there's no way to tell what preset you applied, as the text simply changes to "Edited <date>".

My initial take a few months ago was that this was simply undiscoverable after the image had been saved. Turns out I didn't dig deeply enough into the .phos sidecar files.

tl;dr, it is saved to the .phos. But not to exifdata of exports.

https://blog.tonalphoto.com/what-phocus-writes-to-phos-hncs-presets/

If you've ever tried to customize your Phocus workspace, inter-alia adding tools to the adjust tab, you may have noticed that those changes don't persist over too many app restarts. This was driving me bonkers because the default number of tools in the adjust tab, for example meant I couldn't have 3 panes open at the same time. The top one would inevitably collapse.

I spent weeks chasing a "bug" in Phocus where my hidden tool panels and rearranged windows would revert, seemingly at random. Filed it as a bug, sent plist diffs to HB engineering, the whole thing. Months of back-and-forth. Much to my chagrin, it turns out it was never a bug. One of those Phocus UI anti-patterns.

Phocus's six built-in layouts (Standard, Browse, Viewer, Thumbnails Only, Light Mode, Standard Mode) are read-only templates. Anything you customise while one of them is active is session-only. Tool visibility, window arrangement, toolbar config: all of it gets sometimes gets discarded when Phocus restarts because the built-in layout has no slot to write your changes into. Bizarrely though I couldn't find a pattern I could nail down. Sometimes my changes persisted across several app restarts over several days. Sometimes they reset on a single restart.

Turns out the fix is to create a custom layout. Layouts toolbar button, then Edit, click +, name it, check Views and Tool layout, hit "Update From Current," OK. Now your customisations stick whenever you switch to that layout. Why they couldn't just build this mechanism into the UI so that when one made changes to a canned layout it prompted to save the changes, they alone will know.

The Layouts editor also exposes one option that surprised me: you can save adjustment values as part of a layout. So you can build a "zero everything" layout you toggle to for starting fresh on each image. Not what I'd want most of the time, but a real use case.

Anyway, full post is here: https://blog.tonalphoto.com/phocus-custom-layouts-fix-workspace-resetting/