PLugins will not work on photoshop 26/27 on apple silicon

N.B. I sent this to the developer of the Visionary Panel, hence the reference through out, however I have had the same experience with all but one Photoshop plugin. So in what follows use Visionary Panel as a place holder.

 

 

I have hit an issue installing the Visionary Panel. After installing the Visionary Panel, I found that when Photoshop starts up the Plugins menu is disabled (see screen capture). As depicted in the other screen capture the Manage Plugins window of Creative Cloud also shows that the Visionary Panel is not compatible.  If I disable the Visionary Panel from the Creative Cloud application, then Photoshop starts up properly and the menu is enabled. This happens when I open Photoshop either with Rosetta or in native mode. Bottom line I can no longer use the Visionary Panel on my system. 😢

 

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I have spent 2 days trying to analyze the issue and have a hypothesis. During Photoshop startup it initializes the registered plugins. If there is a run-time error interpreting the plugin code, then Photoshop disables the plugin menu and allows the application to continue. My next step is to find Adobe’s mechanism for logging what happens during startup. I’m not sure what insights I will get from the logs, since I never developed plugins.   

When installing a plugin by double clicking on the .ccx file, the system runs the UnifiedPluginInstallerAgent.app. That utility may have placed startup code in the plugin directory and that is causing the failure. There is no apparent way to start that utility with Rosetta. 

 

Might there be different behaviors installing a plugin from the file system versus from the Creative Cloud Exchange? 

 

How this all started: 

I recently purchased a Mac Mini and began moving my applications from my iMac Pro. Both machines have Photoshop v 27.1.0. The Mini is running MacOS Tahoe 26.1; the Intel-based iMac is running Sequoia 15.7.2  For the Mini configuration, I installed the OS and Applications folder on Macintosh HD, but my user Home folder is on an external drive. I initially used the Mac Migration Assistant to set up the Mini from the iMac. Thinking that may have introduced a problem, I reset the Mini to “out of the box” state and did not use the Migration Assistant. I have begun installing all my applications from their vendor manually, ugh. I did manually copy the Home directory for my user from the iMac. I cleared out the Photoshop plugin directories in the Home area before installing Photoshop.