What does "escalated privileges" actually mean?

[PS_Burner]

   Updated to Photoshop 2018 and tried to add in PIxelSquid. Even though it was listed as "acquired" at the Add-in website, the Adobe CC manager says: "The Add-on Plugin failed to install. It requires escalated privileges, click ..." So, I logged in as administrator (by the way, this same thing happened in the early days when the old manager was used, and I had to switch to being administrator—but that was eventually fixed to allow us users/administrators to do our thing).

   However, while logged in as administrator, I had to wait over four hours (from ~9:30 pm - ~1:30 am) for everything else to be synced in the CC manager. Slow night on the satellite, I guess. Once that was done, though, I tried to install the PIxelSquid Add-in once again (you know, REMOVE and INSTALL, and yes, I waited over five-minutes in-between these actions). Unfortunately, the same thing happened—and don't forget that I'm logged in as administrator (but see next paragraph). Also tried to remove add-ins that wouldn't load in when I was previously logged in as a user (while I was logged in as administrator).

   Nonetheless, the add-ins could not be removed. The kicker in all this mess was I did not know about any of these "escalated privileges" messages telling me they could not be removed until I logged back in as a user. The CC manager while I was logged in as administrator did not update with any messages (but did follow all the syncing, albeit very slow).

  Is the problem because the Add-ins all need to be updated for Photoshop 2018? If not, what am I doing wrong then?

[Jonathan Ferman]

Hi there,

I am sorry you were affected by this, that message essentially means you need to enter your computer admin password, in other words the password you use to install software, enable certain things, etc. Right now you have to click on the pop up message and then it will give you a screen to enter your computer's admin password but it's not where near as obvious or intuitive as we would like and on Windows you have about 5 seconds before that message disappears. So here's my suggestion:

1. Go to http://exchange.adobe.com/addons/my_addons 

2. Sign in with your Adobe ID if you haven't already

3. Find the PixelSquid product and click Remove if the button is showing or Install if that is showing, if it's remove, click remove and then click Install when the install option appears. Wait for the message to pop up about escalated privileges and then click on it to enter your password.

4. If that does not work, click on 'Install issues' from within the My Add-ons page for PixelSquid. Click omniscience's that and at the bottom of the page click on 'Download using Extension Manager >' but DON'T USE EXTENSION MANAGER! Click on the blue Download button and it will download a zxp file. Next get a third party zxp utility, such as Anastasiy's Extension Manager for Adobe platform.  Install the utility and then open the zxp file you just download in the utility and install that way. Ensure Photoshopping is not running when you do the install.

Sorry this is not as smooth as we would like we are looking to provide a better way to show the computer password screen for admin installs and make installing another way simpler in the future.

Let me know if you get it working or get stuck.

Thanks,

Jonathan