Plugin Menu gray

[mrchips109]

Running Photoshop 24.1.0 on Windows 11 64 bit.

Suddenly, my Plugins sub menu has gone gray. Plugins Panel,  Browse Plugins, and Manage Plugins sub-menu items are all gray.

My plugins stopped appearing in the now missing Plugins Panel. My Adobe Creative Cloud shows the missing plugins as installed. None of the plugins have been updated by their authors lately. 

I tried uninstalling and re-installing the plugins and get a message that they were successfully installed. I tried uninstalling and re-installing PS with same results.

The Plugins that were actually legacy extensions are showing up in the extension window. All other plugins are unavailable because the plugin menue is all gray.

Any help appreciated.

[jeffreym]

Well I beg to disagree. I've used PS for 35 years almost daily for several hours a day. For the last several years my user directory has been on a separate multi TB fast drive due to the limited sizes available for internal droves. No other application has ever balked at this since Unix kernels were made. Users only have to be on the network. That was one of the hallmarks of Unix type systems since the beginning. The tech support person also agreed and recognized the problem. Somehow between 24.0.1 and 24.1 the bug got introduced. 

[jeffreym]

You also should be aware that Creative Cloud also accounts for this and we can I stall software in non default locations. MacOS has long had the settings configuration to point user directories to anywhere. They don't  even have to be on the same continent. 

[jeffreym]

Kevin, perhaps I didn't communicate the issue correctly, but this is a real bug and I'm trying to get to those who can take the issue to the engineers, now that tech support has been able to confirm the problem exists. Tech support said the best thing is to bring it back up here in the community so maybe I should start a fresh thread? FYI, it's simple a bug that affects only the Plugins menu, which is relatively recent in Photoshop CC, and the bug has been introduced into v24.1 and exists still in 24.1.1. It is not present in all versions prior.

The User Library needs to be where the User account is located. But that has nothing to do with where the Application might be located nor where the /Applications, /Library /System and /Users folders reside on MacOS. The User Account can be relocated in System Preferences and Creative Cloud can also relocate the applications themselves in the Preferences > Apps under the account menu of the CC app.

The only issue here is with the plugins menu. Everything else works as it should, as do all other CC apps I use. And every other app as well. But without this fixed, I cannot update the app past 24.0.1 and still use my favorite palatte plugins for productive work. And any mac with less than 1TB internal drive will make it difficult for me to remain productive as I need quite a lot of space for my user account data. While it is not common to move a user account to a separate volume, it has always been a useful feature of Unix based systems and one I've used for years on all my Macs.

[CShubert]

@jeffreym at this point please start a new thread so that we can have the team look into this as this thread shows as fixed and your issue appears to be different.

Thank you,

Cory

[jeffreym]

I did try to start a bug report post but for some reason, it wouldn't actually post. Using latest version of Safari and MacOS. I'll try again.

[erinferinferinf]

I moved your question to the "Bugs" section.

If these are CEP "Plugins" (they may not be), here's where your system is looking for them, in order of priority: https://github.com/Adobe-CEP/CEP-Resources/blob/master/CEP_11.x/Documentation/CEP%2011.1%20HTML%20Ex...

You might be able to install them in another location manually and see if that helps. If you're not an admin of your own machine, you'll need to ask your tech support person to help out... or even the person who developed your plugins in the first place.

I would almost say "create a symbolic link" but those also cause problems for plugin developers...

[jeffreym]

Thanks, Erin. I tried looking back through historic backups to see if anything changed in regad to locations of these. They happen to be UXP (I think) and come in .ccx packages. I can download them from the marketplace and they work fine in 24.0.1 and earlier. Just not in 24.1 and later. But as you suggest I had considered sym links but those did not work, though I may not be connecting the correct locations. And I know even if it works, it's a hack and not particularly suitable. Since it's only these plugins that get identified in the Plugins menu, not the Window/Extensions and Legacy menus, I assume it's probably some path or permission issue that previously honored the system's preferences for where a user library is located but somehow lost that and now just defaults to where a default installation would be located.

[Douglas Jiang]

same issue to me, is there any adobe guys tracking this? This issue only happened to uxp plug in

[Kevin Stohlmeyer]

@Douglas Jiang as you can see two Adobe staff members are actively on this thread so yes.

[erinferinferinf · Accepted solution]

same issue to me, is there any adobe guys tracking this? This issue only happened to uxp plug in

By @Douglas Jiang

Hi Douglas,

Do you also have your user directory in a location other than the default location? That seemed to be the issue above.

[Douglas Jiang]

hi erinferinferinf, I didn't change my user directory to other location, when i upgrade to 24.5, all uxp plug-in disappeared, but if i install 23.4, all of them come back.

[Kevin Stohlmeyer]

Hi @Douglas Jiang did you check your plugins folder for 24.5 to see if they are there? Did you try reinstalling plugins after upgrading to 24.5 or moving them manually to the same directory locations as they were in 23.4?

[Douglas Jiang]

I checked the plug-in folder, nothing were there, and I also reset preference, but nothing happened. In adobe creative cloud desk app, all plug-in were there and installed

[Kevin Stohlmeyer]

Hi @Douglas Jiang did you try manually moving them from the 23.4 folder to the 24.5 folder? Do you currently have multiple versions of Photoshop installed?

Are you certain these plugins are compatible with 24.5?

[Douglas Jiang]

i have  multiple versions of Photoshop installed before , but to fix this issue i just only keep 24.5. And I saw one plug-in lumenzia 11.4.4 worked on others but not for me

[Douglas Jiang]

I still got same issue even i use adobe creative cloud cleaner tool uninstalled photoshop then reinstall it.

[wdbphoto11]

Can Adobe make one relaible application?