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Inspiring
October 28, 2023
Question

Installing Photoshop on External Hard Drive

  • October 28, 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 6981 views

My Macintosh Hard Drive on my Mac Mini M1 running Ventura 13.3.1 (a) is getting full and I'm getting "Scratch Disk Full" and "Out of Application Memory" messages. So I need to re-install all my Adobe CC applications on and External Hard Drive. I followed instructions online saying to simply drag Photoshop 2024 from the Applications folder to the External Hard Drive; then I uninstalled Photoshop from the Appications folder. But when I launched Photoshop from the External Hard Drive I got this error message:

Some of the Photoshop components are missing from the Application directory. Reinstall Photoshop.

 

Any advice? 

2 replies

Participating Frequently
August 8, 2024

A little bit late but if anyone runs into this issue on mac... I installed photoshop on external ssd and it gave me the same error. The solution is to install it on the ssd where ever you want, copy the photoshop folder to the default applications folder on Macintosh HD, run it from there and et voila it should open. Now you can delete the photoshop folder from applications folder and run it from your external ssd... cheers.

PS: I just discovered this so I don't know if there will be any bugs.

Kevin Stohlmeyer
Community Expert
Community Expert
August 8, 2024

Good luck. There are application support folders/resources that will start to fault if attempting to run outside of the main HD.

Participating Frequently
August 13, 2024

True for phtoshop... As for illustrator and indesign they are working perfectly fine with no issues till now.

D Fosse
Community Expert
Community Expert
October 28, 2023

Don't even think about it! That's just asking for problems, in a million different ways.

 

Clean out your system drive! If you move all images and assets to an external drive for storage, the operating system and applications shouldn't take up more space than 100 - 120 GB.

 

Anything more than that is basically junk and things you don't need. Most of it will be in your user account. Start with disk cleanup in your operating system.

 

Photoshop installation files are in any case just a couple of GB. That's totally insignificant and negligible in the big picture. You can free up twenty or thirty times that, or even more, with a little housecleaning.

 

 

Participant
February 13, 2025

I appreciate this, mate.

When I went into system storage to start deleting unwanted files I realised I had about 200GB of files that I didn't use - I create music so they were large backedup recordings that I didn't even know existed - had no idea they were all being backed up. 

Definitely worth checking your storage before installing to external drive.