Running Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 in Windows 10

Report · Oct 19, 2017

I am having trouble running my Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 on my new laptop. When I purchased Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 I was running it on Windows Vista Home Premium, but have since upgraded to Windows 10. I installed Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 on my new laptop and have had nothing but trouble. I was at first able to run the program and access my Catalogue through running the Trouble Shooter and selecting Windows Vista Service Pack 2 (or 3). However, since yesterday I can no longer access my program. If I try to open the Edit and Enhance Photos feature, the program freezes up on launch (where it says reading preferences) and does not open. If I try to open View and Organize Photos, the program also freezes and says that it failed to launch the Catalogue. Several people told me to uninstall the Adobe program from my computer and re-install it. However, after having done so I am still having the same problems. Can you provide me with more assistance? At this time I have uninstalled Adobe from my computer again and am waiting to do a fresh install with some guidance.

P.S. I am not very computer savvy, so a step-by-step process would be very much appreciated.

Report · Oct 19, 2017

Photoshop Elements 5, although it will install, will not run properly on Windows 10.

Windows 7 was the last MS operating system that would run it properly.

You would be wise to purchase the latest version: Photoshop Elements 2018.

Report · Oct 20, 2017

I was hoping there might be a work-around to getting the program to work. Strangely, my friend is able to run theirs on Windows 10 without problems. Do you happen to know if I would be able to open my 5.0 projects on the newest version of Adobe Photoshop? I want to be able to access and work on my old projects and hopefully get my Catalogue back. How would I go about doing this?

Report · Oct 20, 2017

Elizabeth92 wrote
Do you happen to know if I would be able to open my 5.0 projects on the newest version of Adobe Photoshop? I want to be able to access and work on my old projects and hopefully get my Catalogue back. How would I go about doing this?

You will be able to open any files saved in PSE 5 on any version of PSE.

I don't use the Catalog, so you will have to see if somebody else can help you with that.

Report · Oct 20, 2017

Elizabeth92 wrote
Strangely, my friend is able to run theirs on Windows 10 without problems.

Wow. That's the first time I've heard that.

Report · Oct 20, 2017

https://forums.adobe.com/people/Peru+Bob wrote
Elizabeth92 wrote
Strangely, my friend is able to run theirs on Windows 10 without problems.
Wow. That's the first time I've heard that.

As a matter of fact, I once tried to re-install PSE5 on Windows 10 and it seemed to work... But there are many traps.

To Elizabeth:

Do you happen to know if I would be able to open my 5.0 projects on the newest version of Adobe Photoshop? I want to be able to access and work on my old projects and hopefully get my Catalogue back. How would I go about doing this?

I don't think you could recover your projects, but to recover catalogs, it's possible, even if the change of database engine from Microsoft Access to Sqlite now requires additional conversion steps.

Convert-organizer-catalog-elements-13-64

Report · Feb 14, 2021

Three and a half years late to the question and maybe this will only help a few people, but here's a bat file that will allow you to launch Photoshop every time on Win 10:

DEL "%appdata%\Adobe\Photoshop Elements\5.0\Editor\Adobe Photoshop Elements 5 Prefs.psp"
start "Photoshop E5" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Photoshop Elements 5.0\Photoshop Elements 5.0.exe" %1

Open Notepad, paste the code, save as "PSLaunch.bat" instead of a ".txt", and if you want to make life extra easy, redirect your photoshop shortcut to the file. Please note, that this assumes you used the default install directory, if you installed it elsewhere, you will need to change the directory.

This code deletes the preferences file which seems to be the issue on Win 10 (and unfortuanately where all the settings are saved, so every launch the settings will be reset) and allows it to properly launch on Windows 10. Kind of a crappy work around but it works every time as of Win 10 20H2

** A note on Open With>Photoshop or directly opening *.psd (photoshop) files**

This will only work if Photoshop is already open, otherwise it will get stuck on the loading screen again. If this happens, close it, launch Photoshop from the bat file and reopen the file.

Report · Jul 07, 2021

Interesting considering I have been using it on Windows 10 for months now. The only issue is the help files don't seem to be there as I get a message the the shortcut does not exist.

Report · Jul 09, 2021

Microsoft decided nobody would want to read their old Help files, and removed that feature from Windows 10 recently.

Report · Jul 25, 2021

I've run it on Windows 10 since Win10 was released, and for the first few years it gave me no issues. However, on more recent updates (19XX/20XX builds), even with a fresh install of windows, it will randomly either work or get hung during launch. The bat file just helps to garentee that PSE5 launches consistantly.