As I open & close pics, suddenly 1 won’t open tho app is running. I can’t Command-Q or Quit from menu, the only way to close is Force Quit. When I reopen, my custom workspace resets to Essentials.

Are the images on the local drive or an external drive?

What version of macOS and Photoshop do you have

On the Mac side the location is:

Macintosh HD/Users/Username/Library/Preferences

and look for the

Adobe Photoshop 2026 Settings folder

Another file you should trash as well is the 

com.adobe.Photoshop.plist

located in the same

Macintosh HD/Users/Username/Library/Preferences folder

I forgot to add that the User Library is hidden by default, so here’s instructions for seeing the contents:

https://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/global/access-hidden-user-library-files.html

Sounds like corrupt PS preferences/settings.

Go into your user account and move the whole “Adobe Photoshop 2026 Settings” folder to your desktop, so a fresh one can be rebuilt on next launch (I’m on Windows and don’t remember the exact path on Mac). This returns the application to clean, out-of-the-box factory state.