How to Set Keyboard Shortcuts for ‘Play Action’ in Photoshop

‘Actions’ in Photoshop are a useful tool to save time in processing and saving images. Typically, to execute a saved action, one would use shortcut keys. However, if your list of actions is extensive, some actions may not have been assigned any shortcut keys. This necessitates manually selecting the corresponding actions and clicking the diminutive ‘Play action’ button to run them.

Nonetheless, by assigning a keyboard shortcut to the ‘Play’ button, you can activate a single or multiple actions simultaneously, thereby simplifying the process and saving time.

The following brief guide will demonstrate how you can assign shortcut keys to the ‘Play action’ button.

Set Keyboard shortcut for ‘Play Action’

1. Go to Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts.

   

2. The options window will appear. From the Shortcuts For dropdown menu, select Panel Menus.

   

3. At Panel Menus, go to Actions and set shortcut keys for the ‘Play‘ button. To set the shortcut, simply highlight Play and press your keyboard keys. In this example, we use keyboard keys Shift + Cmd + 1 as our shortcut.

   

4. Click Accept and then hit the OK button.

   

Conclusion

Now you have successfully added a keyboard shortcut to your ‘Play action’ button. The next time you need to play action, you can simply select an action and hit the keyboard shortcut without having to click on the tiny play button.