Does Photoshop Have Built-In Timelapse Recording?

No. As of Photoshop 2026 there is no built-in feature that records your painting process and exports it as a video. There is no Record button, no time-lapse setting, and no hidden preference that turns one on.

This surprises people mostly because Procreate has had exactly this feature for years, recording every session automatically and exporting a time-lapse replay with no setup at all. Photoshop predates that expectation by two decades and was never rebuilt around it.

Two Photoshop features get mistaken for the missing one. It is worth being precise about what each does, because the difference is why the workarounds do not work.

The History panel is not a recording

The History panel keeps a list of your recent actions so you can step backwards. It is an undo stack, and it has three properties that make it useless as a source for video:

• •It is short. Photoshop keeps a limited number of history states — 50 by default. State 51 pushes out state 1. A six-hour painting session produces tens of thousands of actions.
• •It is temporary. History is discarded when you close the document. It is not saved into the PSD.
• •It does not export. There is no way to render history states out as an image sequence or a video.

History snapshots let you save specific moments manually, which is useful for comparing versions. It is not a timelapse — it is a handful of stills you remembered to take.

The Timeline panel records nothing

Window → Timeline does produce video, which is why it comes up in this search. But it animates content that already exists: you give it layers, it interpolates position, opacity and styles between keyframes, and renders the result.

It has no knowledge of the edits you performed to create those layers. You could build a timelapse in it by hand — duplicating your document into a hundred layers representing a hundred moments and animating their visibility — but you would have to have saved those hundred moments in the first place, which is the actual problem.

So what are the options?

1. Screen recording. Free, and it captures your entire interface plus every zoom and pan, which is exactly what makes sped-up screen recordings hard to watch.
2. A script that exports snapshots on a timer. Cleaner output, but you manage the frames and assemble the video yourself every session.
3. A plugin that records the canvas. This is the category PSFlow is in: it runs inside Photoshop, captures the document rather than the screen, ignores zoom and pan, pauses when you are idle, and exports MP4 directly.

Will Adobe add it?

There is no announced plan to. It has been a recurring community request for years without a shipped feature, and the architectural reason is fairly clear: Procreate was designed from the start around a single document on a single device, while Photoshop is a general-purpose editor handling multi-gigabyte files, smart objects and linked assets. Recording every canvas change is a much larger problem there than it is in Procreate.

Which is why the answer has been plugins rather than a feature. If you want to try one, you can download PSFlow and be recording in about two minutes.