Placed photoshop documents crashing everything

[11eaea]

I have an InDesign document with quite a few placed Photoshop images. (This is a children's book, so, very image-heavy.) I have now experienced this behavior twice:

1) I make a layer change in Photoshop (CC 2017). I save the file. The file save appears to be complete.

2) I return to InDesign (Adobe InDesign 2020). The linked file menu gives me the "update required" exclamation point. I double-click it and confirm that, because layers have changed, some settings may be lost.

3) InDesign gives me the spinning beach ball. I wait for several minutes (walk away, get a snack), and return; still beachballed.

4) I click over to Photoshop, which tells me the previous save actually *isn't* done; it's at 84% (same percentage both times). I wait several more minutes.

5) The first time this happened, I tried to go to another application to kill time, and Finder started acting up. I tried to re-launch Finder, but it fails, repeatedly; thoroughly wedged.  The second time this happened, my entire computer simply froze (no cursor or anything). I've never seen my computer (MacBook Pro, Mojave 10.14) freeze before.

6) The first time this happened, I panicked. Both times, I had to do a hard reset, restart in safe mode, etc. Interestingly, the first time this happened, I was rewarded with an honestly beautiful glitched .psd file (though I didn't love losing the work). The second time, the glitched file was just solid black; boring.

7) Unfortunately, I can't submit a "report crash details to Adobe" because, as mentioned, the entire computer goes down.

My mental model of what's happening here is that InDesign and/or Photoshop are not properly negotiating file lock, and Finder gets caught in the cross-fire.  ...Has anyone else seen this? Any tips of what to avoid? I could probably go with "simply never edit a linked file while InDesign is running," but that seems like a pretty major workflow slowdown, and vulnerable to my forgetting it. (Admittedly, less of a workflow slowdown than 10 minutes of crashing + 20 minutes for safe mode restart = 30 total minutes of panicking and having to cancel meetings.)

[Mike Witherell]

What happens if you upgrade Photoshop to the latest 2020 version? Is InDesign patched up to the latest?

[11eaea]

Well, the main thing that happens is that I'm annoyed by the UI changes and, for several other projects, I have project-specific scripts that don't always work on update. 😛 (I do have the freshest InDesign, though.) But I take your point, and it's a good idea; I'll switch to the newer one for this project.

I'm mostly interested if anyone else has had this experience, since each personal data point is pretty expensive (time, and the stress of possible file system damage).

[Bill Silbert]

The real issue here sounds like it is originating with Photoshop. I say this because apparently InDesign is seeing the Photoshop  file as having been saved but Photoshop is saying it's not. InDesign does not usually give you the update required exclamation point if the Photoshop file has not finished saving. Believe me, I have gone back to InDesign from Photoshop uncountable times expecting to be able to update an image in InDesign only to be denied that joy because the Photshop file isn't done updating. In those cases InDesign shows no evidence at all that the Photoshop file has been changed. I would suggest asking the question in the Photshop forum where other Photoshop users may have experienced the same problem.

[Creamer Training]

I'm leaning towards Photoshop being the problem too. What happens if you turn off the save in background feature in Photoshop (Preferences>File Handling and uncheck Save in Background)?

[11eaea]

That makes sense about the problem being on the Photoshop side.  I've turned off "Save in Background" and I'll see if that makes the difference.  I see that there's a related preference item, "automatically save recovery information" (only selectable if background saving is enabled, so it is now deselected as well); I wonder if somehow the auto saves were happening during/right after the prompted saves.

[Derek Cross]

How much RAM and free disk space do you have?

[11eaea]

Ah, good question. I've got 16 GB RAM and 1.34 TB available disk space, so I think in this case that's not the problem.