Reload Footage (Cmd+Alt+L) updated an item's metadata but left the media
pool's decoded frames and the layer cache in place, so the old image kept
rendering until Edit > Purge. It also replaced the footage with a probe of
the merged document, so a Photoshop layer item lost its layer and its
Retain Layer Sizes bounds.
Reload now re-reads only what the file decides (size, a movie's duration,
streams and frame rate, codec, a data file's text), keeps the layer or
page and the interpretation, finds a Photoshop layer again by name, and
makes the media layer forget the file (FootageSource::forget, which also
drops the EXR aux-channel cache) and clears the layer cache.
Settings > Import > Reload Footage Changed on Disk (on by default): the
desktop app stamps footage files (size + modification time) on a worker
thread every two seconds and when the window comes back to the front, and
reloads what changed. Not an undo step and it doesn't modify the project;
a file still being written is retried on the next check.
footage.reloadChanged runs one check (CLI, MCP, agents).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>