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Photoshop External Drive

Forum|Forum|3 months ago
November 6, 2025
4 replies
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I am not a Photoshop user. A teacher has a MBA M1 (district) computer and a Macbook Pro (Personal) computer. For some reason, PS doesn't work good on the MBA and the teacher needs to use for yearbook related stuff.

Can PS be installed and used off of an external drive?

Correct answer Conrad_C

Photoshop can work well on an M1 MacBook Air, but it depends very much on the specs of that specific computer versus the demands of the job. For example, many M1 MacBook Airs were sold with 8GB of Unified Memory and 256 GB of storage, this was the base model. Although those specs can still be OK for basic administrative school tasks like web browsing, email, and opening documents and spreadsheets, graphics applications such as Photoshop can be much more demanding.

I used to work on the high school yearbook. I could easily put together a yearbook on the M1 MacBook Pro I’m typing on right now, because it has enough Unified Memory (32GB) and internal storage (1TB) to handle the job using Adobe software. In fact I am working on a long book of tutorials right now on my M1 laptop and it runs Adobe Photoshop and Adobe InDesign very well. But a laptop with much lower specs might not be able to handle the photo and layout work; editing a large digital photo might overwhelm it. I wonder if that’s what the problem is here.

Installing on an external drive is possible, it’s an option in the installer. But be aware that it might not help, depending on what’s wrong. If the problem is the laptop not having enough Unified Memory or if there is too little free storage space in the laptop for various temporary cache files, installing it on an external drive won’t solve those limitations of the laptop itself.

We might be able to spot the problem more easily if you can post these facts about that MacBook Air:

The amount of Unified Memory
The amount of internal storage, and how much free space there is
The version of macOS it’s running

P

Philip270089128r4rAuthor

Participant

Thanks everyone for the comments and information. I am in the tech dept. and I was asking ahead of time because I don't want to waste time and effort in something that will lead me to a dead end.

This teacher, in particalur, is using a MBA M1 (2020) computer and I think she had PS on this computer but for some reason is was either slow or just didn't work out for her. However, I don't know the specifics of it.

With that said, I know these computers are limited wtih space. In general, I know Adobe products can use up a lot of space and memory. Typically, software programs are installed on the computer but in rare instances can be installed on to an external drive depending on the circumstances.

E

ExUSA

Genius

RAM will be the limiting factor, if that MBA only has 8GB. There is also disk space limitations, base models had 256GB of storage.

Macs don't have the Windows equivalent of portable apps, and installing on an external drive can help but not greatly.

If she has a base model its maybe time to upgrade her to something more capable. A current M4 or refurb M3 with 16GB of RAM is fine for light/medium Photoshop and design use.

D Fosse

Community Expert

Installing on an external (or non-system) drive is never any point. The installed program files only take up a few GB, and if you're that low on space on the system drive, Photoshop will never work properly.

A very large part of Photoshop will go to the system drive regardless of where the application is installed. This goes into your user account, and can be as much as the program files, and while working often a lot more (not even counting the scratch disk).

Many of the newer AI-based Photoshop/Camera Raw functions will use the system pagefile for temporary storage, not the scratch disk. If you have a limited amount of RAM, the GPU will use a large chunk of it performing Photoshop tasks, and this may also eat into the system pagefile. All of this further reducing available space on your system drive.

In short, Photoshop consumes a huge amount of memory and disk space. 8 GB RAM and a 256 GB system drive - if that's what it has - is simply not enough, especially if it has an integrated GPU that uses shared system RAM.

Conrad_C

Correct answer

Community Expert

Photoshop can work well on an M1 MacBook Air, but it depends very much on the specs of that specific computer versus the demands of the job. For example, many M1 MacBook Airs were sold with 8GB of Unified Memory and 256 GB of storage, this was the base model. Although those specs can still be OK for basic administrative school tasks like web browsing, email, and opening documents and spreadsheets, graphics applications such as Photoshop can be much more demanding.

I used to work on the high school yearbook. I could easily put together a yearbook on the M1 MacBook Pro I’m typing on right now, because it has enough Unified Memory (32GB) and internal storage (1TB) to handle the job using Adobe software. In fact I am working on a long book of tutorials right now on my M1 laptop and it runs Adobe Photoshop and Adobe InDesign very well. But a laptop with much lower specs might not be able to handle the photo and layout work; editing a large digital photo might overwhelm it. I wonder if that’s what the problem is here.

Installing on an external drive is possible, it’s an option in the installer. But be aware that it might not help, depending on what’s wrong. If the problem is the laptop not having enough Unified Memory or if there is too little free storage space in the laptop for various temporary cache files, installing it on an external drive won’t solve those limitations of the laptop itself.

We might be able to spot the problem more easily if you can post these facts about that MacBook Air:

The amount of Unified Memory
The amount of internal storage, and how much free space there is
The version of macOS it’s running

E

ExUSA

Genius

As a data point, my production computer at home is an M1 Mac mini with 16GB/256GB and it works fine, I have Photoshop and Lightroom Classic running on it 24/7 plus sometimes use Safari or VSCode. I DO have a bunch of external drives, and both Thunderbolt and HDMI-connected monitors. I wouldn't want to use a base M1 Air for design just due to RAM limitations.

E

ExUSA

Genius

Maybe the district IT person should fix the school issued MacBook?

Photoshop must be installed on the computer that is going to run it. The applications can be installed on an external drive but there are numerous components that go on the system drive as well.

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