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I do now notice that when I "close" PS, and also Safari, Word, and some others that they dont quit entirely. They remain "open" and get a dot below their icon in the bottom dock. To "quit" them I have to right-click on the icon in the dock and select "quit." Why they are like that I dont understand, but nor do I really care.
By @jamesgerboc
You probably do care because the reason for that is the answer to the question, and all that behavior is consistent with my reply on Feb. 7. Specifically, regarding your screen shots:
When I close (via the red dot) Bridge, the Bridge icon goes away. When I close (via red dot) LR, it asks if I want to quit, and the icon goes away. When I close (via red dot) PS, it closes but the icon stays in the dock. Why the inconsistency? Why doesnt PS ask if I want to quit, and quit? Why does Bridge just quit when I close it? Those are the things I notice daily.
By @jamesgerboc
Some of the confusion is understandable and not your fault, because some things have changed over the years that make things different now.
Consistent with my explanation, Lightroom Classic and Bridge are coded as macOS single-window applications like Apple iMovie, Apple Pages, etc. Close the single window and the entire application closes. (Floating panels with thin title bars, including the Secondary Display for Lightroom Classic, don’t count as windows, technically they’re implemented as panels.)
Photoshop, as it has been for the last 30 years, is coded as a macOS multiple-window application like Microsoft Word/Excel, Apple Safari, Apple Preview… Closing the last open window does not quit any of those applications.
Bridge is the one that now confuses even the veterans. For many years Bridge was a multiple-window macOS application. But Bridge 2023 (the current version 13) went through a major rewrite, which partly involved making it Apple Silicon-native which is a good thing. But Bridge was not only recoded but also redesigned, and a lot of other things about Bridge changed, which people did not expect or were told much about.
One of the big changes is that Adobe converted Bridge to a single-window macOS application. So the fact that Bridge just quits when you close its single window is totally expected and consistent from a technical point of view. But where this confuses everyone, including you, is that in all the previous versions, Bridge was a multiple-window application. So it didn’t used to behave the way it does now. (Now you open multiple Content panels instead.) There is nothing technically wrong with the way Bridge 2023 works, but it is different than before, and if you go over to the Bridge community there are a lot of complaints about the change — they want Bridge to be able to support multiple windows again.
So to summarize, as confusing as it is, all of the following are true:
- From a technical point of view, everything you described is completely consistent with how things work behind the scenes on macOS, so technically, there is no bug and no problem.
- From a user poinf of view, the whole thing is definitely confusing because neither Apple nor Adobe really talk about the differences in how Mac applications quit depending on whether they’re single- or multi-window.
- When Bridge 2023 was released, what Adobe said is Bridge now lets you have multiple Content panels open, including the ability to put one on another display. They did not talk about how this was a fundamental change to Bridge window management because multiple windows were no longer possible (Bridge was converted to a single-window application, like Lightroom), and how that also affects quitting.
When I close (via red dot) LR, it asks if I want to quit, and the icon goes away. When I close (via red dot) PS, it closes but the icon stays in the dock. Why the inconsistency? Why doesnt PS ask if I want to quit, and quit? Why does Bridge just quit when I close it?
By @jamesgerboc
Again, the logic makes sense and is consistent to Apple and Adobe programmers, but not to users:
Lightroom Classic asks you if you want to quit mostly because you might be in the middle of working with 300 files from different folders (e.g. in a collection), so if you accidentally press Command-Q or click the red dot the app quits and you have to remember what you were doing with those 300 files, so it asks you before going away in the middle of your work, and that’s good.
Photoshop does not ask you if you want to quit for several reasons: You usually work with one or two documents, but typically not tens or hundreds at a time like you might in Lightroom. Photoshop has a Save command, so if all changes are saved you lose nothing if you quit, and if some changes are not saved it will ask you if you want to save before quitting, so that’s already covered.
Bridge is not an image editor like the other two. It’s mostly a file browser like the Mac Finder desktop. Similar to the Finder, Bridge does not maintain open unsaved documents or do direct image editing, so it also has no need for a Save command, so no work will be lost if it quits at any time, so it doesn’t ask you. (You could argue that Bridge should ask you because it can be used intensively on many images like Lightroom Classic.)
... here is my problem. You are asked to quit LR because of possibly many documents but you are not asked in PS even though you may have spent days editing one image? Pick a workflow for all Adobe products. You mention LR does not have a SAVE and PS does. Again, that makes no sense. They both are editors. I use Lightroom and CameraRaw. They do the same thing!
By @jamesgerboc
It actually makes sense from the perspective of how each applications works, and they don’t work the same way.
Photoshop follows an older model, more like Microsoft Word: If you want to work on a document, you open the document, it appears in its own window or tab, and you must use a Save command.
Lightroom Classic follows a newer model that is actually quite common now in many recent Mac and Windows applications — for example, Apple Photos now works in exactly the same way. When you want to work on a photo in Lightroom Classic, you do not “open” it but simply select it, and when you make an edit, you do not have to remember to “save” because it automatically saves every edit you make as soon as you finish it. (This is why applications like Lightroom Classic and Apple Photos have no File > Save command on their menus.) If you just now moved the Exposure slider, when you let go that changed is saved in the Lightroom Classic catalog database. And again, unlike Photoshop, it is possible to sync or paste edits to hundreds of photos at once, and as soon as you finish that, all those edits are saved to all those hundreds of photos at once. All those changes and you did not have to remember to save.
So, that should help make it clear:
Photoshop uses the old model where you must use a Save command, so if you are going to quit and a document has unsaved changes, you must be asked if you want to save before quitting.
Lightroom Classic uses the newer model where there isn’t even a File > Save command because saving is done for you with every edit, so when you quit, naturally there is no need to ask you if you want to save before quitting. (This is a slightly different question than being asked if you want to quit.)
In ANY application except Photoshop, when you close the application it quits the application.
By @jamesgerboc
No, not in any application. How an macOS application behaves when you close its last open window depends on whether it’s technically single-window or multiple-window, and this goes back many years.
If you close the only open window (e.g. click the red dot in the title bar) and the developer has set it up as a single-window macOS application, the application quits. It should no longer appear as open in the Dock, menu, or Application Switcher. Examples of single-window macOS applications are Apple Photos, Apple Keynote, macOS System Settings (formerly Preferences), or Adobe Lightroom Classic.
If you close the only open window (e.g. click the red dot) in a multiple-window macOS application, the application does not quit, it remains running and open. In multiple-window capable applications, you must quit by choosing the File > Quit command. Examples of multiple-window macOS applications include Apple Safari, Apple TextEdit, Microsoft Word, Apple Preview, and Adobe Photoshop.
Now, you do have a real problem if you specifically quit Photoshop (File > Quit or its keyboard shortcut) and it does not quit.
But if you merely close the application window or a document window (by clicking the red dot or choosing any of the File > Close commands), then Photoshop should remain running as it is technically a macOS multiple-window application.
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