Technical Usage Notes
This document has details about what's currently supported, limitations, and workarounds for the Photoshop API to help optimize your API implementations and understand service boundaries.
Known limitations
These are known limitations to the Photoshop APIs:
- Multi-part uploads and downloads aren't yet supported.
- All endpoints only support a single file input.
- Error handling is a work in progress; you may not always see the most helpful error messages. Apologies.
Compatibility with Photoshop versions
- The APIs will open any PSD created with Photoshop 1.0 or later.
- When the API saves files as PSD, it will create PSDs compatible with the current version of Photoshop.
- Regarding "maximize compatibility" referenced in the Photoshop file formats documentation, the APIs default to "yes".
About retries
For increased reliability and stability, there's a retry mechanism for all API calls:
- The service will retry status codes of
429
,502
,503
,504
three times. - You should only retry requests that have a 5xx response code. This indicates a problem processing the request on the server. You shouldn't retry requests for any other response code.
- Implement an exponential back-off retry strategy with three retry attempts.
Rate limits
These are the API usage limits:
General service limits
Hard limit
- POST: 16 requests/3 secs or 320 requests/minute.
- GET: 310 requests/3 secs.
Soft limit
- POST: 15 requests/3 secs or 300 requests/minute.
- GET: 300 requests/3 secs.
Remove background service limits
Hard limit
- POST: 6 requests/3 secs.
- GET: 1000 requests/3 secs.
Soft limit
- POST: 2 requests/3 secs.
- GET: 500 requests/3 secs.