Moving settings from old mac to new mac

Question

Went from 2019 MBPro 15-inch Sonoma to 2023 M2 Sequoia, 16-inch, 32RAM, 1TB storage. Tried to reinstall PS. 18 years of actions and other settings did not move. Intructions I find in myriad places do not work; instructions do not match what I see in PS. Someone has the answer. I cannot be the only one with this stupid problem. How does Adobe not have clear, understandablde, easily navigatible instructions on how to do what should be a straightforward process, VERY common thing. I've done ZERO work today just trying to fix this. Sometimes Adobe just makes me want to tear the NY phone book in half.

PS v26.7.0
Mac Sequoia
Setting up new computer; tried moving the app like always. PS would not work, got an error msg telling me to reinstall, which I did. NOTHING - no settings, etc - moved w/ the reinstall. Yet, my plug-ins and filters - Nik, OnOne, etc moved.
None of my actions, layouts, workspaces, etc. transferred. Instructions to move manually do not match what I'm seeing in PS. So far, Sequoia is the Mac version of Windows Vista.

tar4heel2 · Accepted Answer

Well, success at last. I tried the last-resort trick; retransfer the computer user account again. Deleted the first iteration on the destination computer, setup thye transfer again w/ Migrate Assistant.

Nailed it. All is well.

Thanks so much to those who tried to help. Bunch of great people here!

D Fosse · Answer

For what it's worth, and I do realize this isn't the answer you want, but here goes: Migrating settings is a bit risky and IMO best avoided. It can cause problems down the road. Save out actions, brushes etc and reload in the new installation. Reinstall plugins where applicable.

Settings are rewritten on every application exit, so are prone to corruption by irregular shutdowns. Small errors will accumulate, and with new application code in the new version, latent problems can surface.

Corrupt preferences usually look like application bugs and are often mistaken for that.

The settings file contains a lot more than your own user settings. It's the entire application configuration, including lots of hidden and inter-dependent parameters. The settings are stored in your user account, not with the program files. When Photoshop starts up, it reads the configuration from your user account. Deleting this folder returns the application to clean, out-of-the-box factory state.

But if you do need to access old settings, they are in your user account.

Ten minutes to set up fresh settings (and reloading your saved actions etc) is well spent.

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