Photoshop Crashes when opening a file on MacBook Air M1

I absolutely would, if I didn't have to go through the labyrinthine process of transferring licenses. Some are only transferrable X number of times per year, which I had to do when the iMac went down, so, usually, that number is 2, which required me to transfer them here to keep working. It's not just as simple as wiping the computer and reinstall, as a lot of software requires time-consuming transferring of licenses, time that I just don't have. If I was using a machine for basic tasks, yes, that would be the answer, but definitely not the case here. That process in itself would take days and days (I've done it before). All in all, Photoshop is the only application I'm having problems with—everything else is fine. Not worth torching everything just to get Photoshop working, I'd be better off just getting a new iMac and hoping Photoshop works for that.

If I was still working for Apple and a customer came in with long-running problems, that would be my advice. Start over with a release OS, reinstall, setup your apps from scratch, migrate your documents over. That would fix things 99 times out of 100.

Unfortunately, that's just not an option, so I'll see if anyone else has any ideas. Nonetheless, it makes absolutely little sense that Photoshop can work with .psd files just fine but can't handle .jpeg or .png files. That's just weird. And it has nothing to do with the beta. This problem has been going on in Photoshop for a very long time intermittently (see here, here, and here)—never once was a beta the issue, so, it's not utterly illogical to conclude that isn't the issue here.

Anyway, thanks for trying, I'll see if anyone else has any ideas.

When I see someone running beta OS's on production machines, I'm immediately suspicious as that's a big red flag. Ditch the betas, they are not for daily use. Then maybe someone can help with troubleshooting.

Thanks for your prompt reply.

The Sonoma was the beta release, as well, so I went from beta to beta. You can't just downgrade the OS like that, at least not without wiping the machine, something I'd have less of an issue with if the iMac was working. I tried to start the iMac in every kind of mode: Safe Mode, Recovery Mode, Internet Recovery Mode, Target Disk Mode—all failed. So, I can't run the iMac as an external hard drive. It's toast, though I appreciate the info (you didn't know all of those things).

Speaking of drives, I do have three external hard drives, one is 12 TB, the other 2 TB, and the other 1 TB (where my scratch disks are). Plenty of space, and while I have the base model MacBook Air (it wasn't intended to be a production computer as I had the iMac Pro for that until last week), forgive me if I fail to see how opening a 530 KB .jpeg file—with no other apps or files open—would make Photoshop choke, especially when I can run After Effects, Premiere Pro, FL-Studio, Audition, and a host of other power-intensive applications on this machine perfectly well, often at the same time, with zero issues. Usually, when the RAM (unified) or disk stalls out, there's an error prompt "You've run out of memory, please close applications" but that's not what's happening. It just crashes the moment I open it.

It seems like a bug with Photoshop and by the looks of it, this bug has persisted for some years here and there. At this point, my best option will be to buy a new iMac and pray that Photoshop actually works on that. Cheers.

Do not use Sequoia on a production computer! Its NOT a finished release, its a beta for testing only. I would revert to Sonoma first and foremost.

Second, please post a system report (Help->System Info) so we can see the MBA specs. If it is a base model with 8GB of RAM, forget it. You need 16GB of RAM to realistically use Photoshop. You also need enough scratch disk space, again a base model with 256GB of drive space is marginal. You'll probably need an external drive, a USB-C or Thunderbolt SSD is an excellent choice.

Third, you can run the iMac off an external drive if need be, to get working again. A 1 or 2TB external is fine, USB 3.0 will be slow but will work, USB-C or Thunderbolt will work pretty closely to the internal drive.