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

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”



• 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.