Photoshop Crashing

[jessicamannsphoto]

Hey, I'm having issues with both Photoshop Beta and Photoshop 2025 crashing as soon as I open them. Both are updated to the latest versions. I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling the apps, restarting my computer, and opening both with "shift" key held to see if plugins were the issue.

This has been happening since yesterday and today Photoshop Beta had an update so I was relieved thinking it would fix it, but alas it did not for me. Both apps will open but if I click on anything at all, they freeze and I have to force quit. I've tried waiting it out and not forcing quit quickly to see if it would sort itself out with patience and it didn't haha. Anyone have any suggestions? 

I'm running macOS Sequoia 15.0.1 and it's happening both on my MacBook Pro and my iMac.

[digamma]

Same problem - Photoshop 2025 and the latest Photoshop Beta both crash on launch on MacOS Sequoia 15.3.2.
When I try to launch either of them, the splash screen flashes up briefly and then nothing, except that I can see on the Activity Monitor window that the Adobe Crash Processor has been launched.

I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling, using the Adobe Cleaner Tool and when that made no difference I tried the Clean My Mac Uninstaller.
I also tried going back to an older level of Photoshop.

I'm not sure exactly when this happened but I don't think any flavour of Photoshop has worked since the upgrade to Sequoia 15.3.2

Luckily Lightroom Classic still works.
It's still annoying because I have the Photography plan and I can't use Photoshop as my external editor.

I've tried deleting everything including Creative Cloud (except I don't want to delete Lightroom) and nothing else helps.

What else can I try?

Adrian

[Derek Cross]

How much RAM and spare hard disk capacity do you have?
Have you tried unticking "Use Graphics Processor" found under the Performance tab in Photoshop Settings (then closing and reopening the application)?

[digamma]

Derek

thanks for your reply.

I have 32gb of RAM, it's a late 2021 M1 MacBook Pro with a 2TB internal SSD with about 1.2GB used.

Do you have a way I can untick the Graphics Processor option when Photoshop always crashes just after displaying the splash panel and before I can interact with it at all?

The only thing I haven't tried is completely reinstalling MacOS but I'm reluctant to go down that route.

[Derek Cross]

It might be worth trying to reset the Photoshop settings back to the factory defaults using the manual method to see if that does anything.

Launch Photoshop and quickly hold down the following keys:

Mac OS: Shift+Control+Option+Command

When prompted to delete the Preferences, click Yes
(If you don't see the question repeat the exercise.)

[digamma]

The good news is that holding down Shift+Control+Option+Command at launch of Photoshop did give me the chance to reset preferences. But it still crashed immediately after that.
Now when I launch Photoshop  and hold down the same key combination it lets me choose which drive to use as a scratch disk.
And then crashes....

[Derek Cross]

Can you confirm that previously you used the Adobe Cleaner Tool to remove all traces of the Adobe applications and then did a clean install?

[digamma]

I did use the Cleaner Tool  but afer I reinstalled Photoshop it still crashed on launch in them same way as before I used the Cleaner Tool

[Derek Cross]

What about trying it again and removing all traces of Adobe applications?

[digamma]

Will I lose my Lightroom catalogue if I do that?

[Derek Cross]

I don't know, I don't use Lightroom, ask in the Lightroom forum. I would have thought there would be a backup method.

[D Fosse]

The Lightroom catalog is a file, completely separate from the Lightroom application. You can store the catalog file wherever you want, and make as many backup copies as you want and store them wherever you want. It will be there even if you uninstall Lightroom, ready for when you reinstall.

[digamma]

Derek

thanks for your suggestions.

Since everything else had failed, I uninstalled all the Adobe products I could find on my MacBook: Photoshop, Lightroom,  Acrobat Reader, Bridge, Creative Cloud, then ran the Cleaner tool, rebooted and reinstalled. 

The good news is that the reinstalled Lightroom iseems to be unaffected: it found the catalogue and all the existing plugins.
The bad news is that Photoshop still crashes in the same way.
I didn't explicitly reinstall any Photoshop plugins but is it possible that it's found some previously used plugins and one of those is causing the crash?
Is there a way to launch Photoshop in something like safe mode where it doesn't try to load any plugins?

Do you have any other suggestions about how to diagnose the crashing problem?
 

[digamma]

@Derek Cross as a next step I uninstalled Photoshop, booted into recovery mode and ran a first aid check on the MacOS system drive where Photoshop and other apps are installed. 
First Aid found a few errors and claimed to have repaired the drive.
Reinstalled Photoshop but I still have the same crash on startup.
The Adobe Crash Handler kicks in every time - is it recording anything that wiould help diagnose the problem?

[digamma]

Holding Shift while launching Photoshop gives you the option to skip loading plugins.

When I did that, Photoshop loaded cleanly.

Now I have to figure out how Photoshop knows which folders to search for plugins and how to selectively disable loading until I identify which one was causing the problem.

[digamma]

Problem solved!
In the folder Macintosh HD /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Plug-Ins/CC
there was this item, evidently part of an app that had been deleted:  ON1 Resize AI 2023.plugin
After I deleted that plugin file, Photoshop no longer crashes and launches quite happilt.