How do I move my Adobe apps, Photoshop, Lightroom etc to new external drive?

Question

I currently have all my Adobe apps on my iMac hard drive but to give more space and hopefully speed, I would like to run all these apps from a new ssd external drive. How do you do this? Will I have to download all again from Adobe? I have the monthly photographer subscription membership so there should be no problem in access. Surely I can't just drag and drop. Everything is backed up externally so I could access it all there. Any help please? I am running Sonoma OS with Photoshop 2024 and Lightroom Classic mainly.

D Fosse · Answer

Don't do it! At most you gain a couple of GB, which is negligible and insignificant in the big picture. It just doesn't help, you'll have the same problem in two weeks.. The Photoshop scratch disk alone wil need 10-20 times that.

In addition, having program files off the system drive can cause a variety of problems. A big part of the installation will go to the system drive anyway.

You need to take more drastic measures if you're that low on space. Move everything possible off it, run disk cleanup from your operating system. Empty the recycle bin! This alone will probably clear much more space than those few GB of installation files.

If you use Bridge, Premiere Pro and others, their preview caches can grow to tens of GB. These can be moved to your external drive.

Finally, there are utilities that show you in a graphical interface exactly what fills up your drive and where it is. Invaluable if you want to be systematic with this.

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