Unable to open older Apps after re-install of OS on 10 year old iMac 27

[andy_hutch1947]

I have had my iMac for about 10-11 years and the highest OS I can install is High Sierra 10.13.6. Sometime between 2014 and 2021 I purchased several Adobe Apps, ie, Adobe 12 Organizer, Adobe Elements 2018 Organizer, Adobe Media Encoder CC 2019, Adobe Photoshop Elements 2018, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Adobe Creative Cloud, to name a few. I paid for most but maybe some later were free downloads. I used one of these pretty regularily to combine several PHOTOS Libraries into one library. I used our home network to pull in all of my wife and my old iPhoto Accounts in with our current Libraries. I think I was combining about 5-6 Photo Libraries into one.

Well, the bad news is, I started having crazy things going on with my High Sierra Updates so I decided to do a fresh install of High Sierra. I copied Applications, and Downloads and just about every photo and thing I could find from the Macintosh 2GB Harddrive to a new external Hard Drive so that I could copy everything back into the Mac HD after the new install. Well after copying the Apps back into the reformatted 2 GB Mac HD, none of the Adobe Apps will run. I get a window that says "Configuration error", Error 16.

I get this when I try to open the first four Apps. So... what next? Can I somehow re-download these Apps and reinstall them? I have 140,000 photos on Apple's iCloud plus a few thousand more to add to these that are in other Photos Library folders. I don't remember which App I used to combine the Library's.

Sorry I took so long to get to the problem. Too many brain farts. 😕

[Greg_S.]

I know nothing about Macs.  Hopefully, this article will help you solve your error 16 problem.

It's unclear from your post whether all you want to do is create a new catalog for all of your photos or whether you are trying to resurrect an old catalog.  You mention a couple of versions of the Organizer.  Each time you upgrade an Organizer catalog, it will be converted to the newer version.  So, if that is what you did, I suggest that you only install Elements 2018 (if you paid for it rather than just using it for a trial).  If you have a backup of your 2018 catalog, you will be able to open it with that program.  And if you wish to open an earlier version catalog, you will be able to convert it with Elements 2018.

And you can follow this link to your Adobe account and you should find links to download your purchased programs.  You will have to sign into your account in order to open the page.

[Greg_S.]

@andy_hutch1947, I have corrected the account link given in my previous post so if you are using the link given in a forum notification email, it won't take you directly to the correct page.  Go to the forum to follow the correct link.