Opening Apple Photo Library on external drive in CC Photoshop

[Joel Heiland]

I am running High Sierra 10.13.6 (max OS allowed on my mid 2010 iMac), and have moved my Apple Photos Library to an external drive (dealing with a large photo and video collection).

PS 21.2.4

CC 5.3.1.470

When the Photos Library was on the iMac internal drive, I could open files in Photoshop by using

Open > On My Computer > scroll down to Media on the left pane of the window and select Photos next to the camera icon.

Now that the Photos Library is stored externally, all I get is the spinning wheel of "wait for it" forever. No pictures display, and no error is returned. Just the spinning "activity processing" wheel of death.

I tried uninstalling CreativeCloud and all the Adobe apps, then reinstaling them, in case they had stored the Photos Library locationl and wasn't updating for the new external drive location.

It seems that Photoshop is unable to ask the Mac OS where the library exists and is only looking for the default location.

Begging your pardons Apple, Adobe, and anyone else who thinks using a ten year old computer is nonsensical.

[Joel Heiland]

Additional info: the external hard drive was formatted Mac OS Journaled Extended.

and when I moved the Apple Photos Library back to my internal hard drive, I found that it needs to reside in the folder "Pictures" to be found by CC Phostoshop.  Apple Photos application can find the library wherever I put it (after I teach it where to look), but not Photoshop.

[Creamer Training]

What happens if you move the library and put an alias of the library in the Pictures folder?