Share Adobe Photoshop Between Mac OS X 10.7 Lion & 10.6 Snow Leopard

Sep 9, 2011 - 6 Comments

Photoshop in Mac OS X

If you dual boot Mac OS X 10.6 and 10.7 then you may have noticed that some apps installed in one OS don’t necessarily work in the other. Some of these are because of 10.7 Lion specific features or Rosetta, but others throw random errors that don’t make much sense. Case in point: Adobe Photoshop.

Launching Photoshop installed within Snow Leopard from Lion, you get the nondescript “Error 6” telling you to reinstall Photoshop. Instead of installing PS on both partitions, you can skirt this error by using a symbolic link to access the 10.6 installations App Support folder. This will save disk space and the hassle of managing multiple Creative Suite installations.

From Mac OS X Lion:

  • Quit Photoshop
  • Launch the Terminal (/Applications/Terminal)
  • Enter the following command – this assumes your OS X 10.6 drive is called “Macintosh HD” be sure to change that if it’s not:
  • sudo ln -s /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Library/Application\ Support/Adobe /Library/Application\ Support/Adobe

  • Relaunch Photoshop – you’ll get a new error message, choose “Do Not Update”
  • Do not update Photoshop

  • Click “OK” at the next error screen and enjoy full Photoshop access

This is great tip comes from Nate Stedman, the same guy who brought us the Shake-To-Undo Mac app.

Hopefully an update to Photoshop will prevent the need for this in the near future.

.

Related articles:

Posted by: William Pearson in Mac OS, Tips & Tricks, Troubleshooting

6 Comments

» Comments RSS Feed

  1. Bill says:

    Fix doesn’t work.

  2. Pat says:

    After I installed Lion, Photoshop crashed the first time I used it. After that, PS runs better than it ever did. Smoother and faster with Lion.

    MacBook Pro 17, late 2007 model with 3GB RAM

  3. Andrew says:

    I use Photoshop Extended CS5 which i installed whilst i was running Snow Leopard, and since upgrading to Lion it has worked just great, same goes for Bridge CS5 as well.

    Oh yes, love your site, has been very informative. ;-)

  4. Alberto says:

    And… I get the same error with all the components of CS5 (CS5.5) Suite… :(

  5. Alberto says:

    Don’t work, I continue to get the Error 6 message……

  6. DNG says:

    I do this at work every day and I’ve never had a problem or an error, maybe this is only for some types of installations?

Leave a Reply

 

Shop on Amazon.com and help support OSXDaily!

Subscribe to OSXDaily

Subscribe to RSS Subscribe to Twitter Feed Follow on Facebook Subscribe to eMail Updates

Tips & Tricks

News

iPhone / iPad

Mac

Troubleshooting

Shop on Amazon to help support this site