Installing Photoshop on External Hard Drive

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
October 28, 2023
2 replies
6991 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?

macOS

W

waelfarouq

Participating Frequently

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.

L

Lumigraphics

Legend

But you aren't fixing the main problem of a full internal drive.

L

Lumigraphics

Legend

@waelfarouq you can use a USB-C SSD external for scratch disk. Much more reliable than trying to install applications on an external.

Absolutely correct, Kevin. This works well. I found a couple of USB-C SSDs on clearance at Office Depot and use those for scratch disks (plugged into my Thunderbolt monitor.) Works perfectly and I don't need to use it for anything else.

D Fosse

Community Expert

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.

C

ciaran_9383

Participant

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.

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