I recommend replacing the Fusion drive with a SSD. Not for the faint of heart, taking apart an iMac is non-trivial with lot of fragile connectors.
FWIW: I have a 2014 Mac mini I use for CS3. On the PCI slot I added an OWC drive, the SATA drive is an OWC SSD. Monterey runs on the faster PCI slot drive, Mojave with CS3 on the OWC. I decided not to run Mojave virtually due to speed and memory issues. The downside is I can only boot one macOS at a time. The mini is not my main Mac.
My personal philosophy here is that if I need something, I am willing to pay quite a bit for it. But if I don’t feel I need it, I will begrudge even a trivial cost.
Yeah…something to be said for that…but if you need an asset manager for your images and don’t want to just use Finder because you want keywords and stars and all of the other features of LR…then you need one and AFAIK Elements doesn’t do any of that…and Luminar’s catalog functions are pretty simplistic at best. And a lot depends on how much disposable income one has…and I’ve not done my sort of cost comparisons but if one upgrades whatever non sub app every other year and it costs 80 bucks…then it’s 40 bucks a year and while that is cheaper than Adobe sub…it’s not very much per month and there’s a lot of value added…that’s important to me but then I want keywords and stars and non destructive edits and all that…and Elements doesn’t do that except for the non destructive thing if you make multiple copies of the image…and that’s a pain to deal with via Finder.
It all comes down to needs and wants and whether the extra features are worth 10 bucks a month to the user.
The problem I have is with Affinity Designer. As an old hand at Illustrator (albeit using it as a fairly basic drawing tool), I find Designer incredibly obtuse. There are absolutely no parallels in functionality, and this is again just for creating simply 2D drawings with shapes and lines. I’ve been hard-pressed to find a tutorial that is written to help someone like me migrate to Designer from Illustrator. It’s been really frustrating…
Interesting discussion, thanks for sharing folks.With the mention of Prepress functions, @MMTalker touches upon my background as a former prepress professional. 25 years plus in the profession has afflicted me with some skillsets that are going to be hard to replicate in any other applications, even tho I’m not doing it for a living anymore. I do find myself volunteering to do some basic desktop publishing, layout and preflighting jobs before my non profit based sends any artwork to press once in awhile.
In the mean time, after some research here in the TidBits forums, it’s looking like booting from an external SSD on the iMac’s Thunderbolt slot is the fastest way to run an old MacOS to run the old Adobe Suites. Currently I’m ooking into the reliable Thunderbolt cases and SSDs to purchase and build a bootable disc volume that will work. As for the iMac’s internal drive, in order to achieve the most reliable updated system, It seems as though I need to also upgrade the Fusion Drive to a SSD as well. As I understand it the Fusion drive doesn’t handle the required disk format for the latest MacOS? This is getting to be a bit costly. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
Thanks @CyborgSam
That’s very helpful information! Much appreciated.
I would keep your internal fusion drive as it is and install the new OS on the external SSD. That’s probably the cheapest and least problematic solution. That way you can try out the new installation without altering your current set-up. If it works, you can set the external SSD as your startup disk. Or hold down option when booting to choose which disk to boot from.
Recommend the EVO 870 SSD, and the Sabrent USB3 enclosures have worked well for me, but check your ports.
As Sierra can’t format the disk to APFS which is necessary for the modern OS verions, I first had to install High Sierra on a partition on the SSD, then boot into that to format the other partion to APFS ready for the Monterey (or later) install. Just make sure you select the external disk (not your internal fusion drive) when installing the new OS!
I work on an iMac Pro. I have it’s SSD partitioned. Most of the time I boot into OS 13.2.1 and use the Affinity trio.
As a last resort, using the other partition. I can boot into OS 10.14.6 then use CS4.
Thank you very much for sharing your iMac 2017 experience. That’s a huge help to clarify a less expensive route.
Speaking of checking ports, we do have 2 thunderbolt 3 ports on our respective iMacs. I’ve never booted from Tb 3 ports, they’re rated at 40Gb, versus USB 3 (v2) speed at 10Gb, and I imagine that would be much faster.
Has anyone setup their boot volume via Tb 3 and noticed an appreciable difference than booting from USB 3?
As I understand it, the Tb 3 speed is rated faster than the iMac’s internal SATA port, which seems odd.
Wow, that’s great! Thanks for sharing
I used to do this on a Mac mini 2018. External SSD over Thunderbolt3/USB-C. Theoretical speeds go out of the window. Once small files are involved it all slows down. Speed of the external drive is also a factor. As is the speed of the computer bus. Internal is the fastest, no question.
Regarding upgrades, I would weigh up against simply buying a new computer. You’re fighting a losing battle with a Mac Apple considers obsolete. Security and browser updates stopped a long time ago.
I resisted Apple silicon for a while, but it really is so much faster and less power hungry. I’m sure part of the speed boost I received was going back to an internal drive rather than my external SSD.
Though I can’t speak for your VM needs, I only run classic Macintosh in emulators and Windows in VMs/CrossOver. My daily driver is Monterey.
Finally, I would say that having your experience dictated by an app/suite you may only use occasionally doesn’t make much sense to me. I’d rather set up an ideal computer, and then bend it a bit to run those occasional apps.
Ah, so you do see the silliness (or is it futility?), of my efforts to keep updated while clinging to the past. ;-)
All great points you’ve made.
But joking aside, I do enjoy making my technology investments last as long as possible, so as to combat apple’s wasteful planned obsolescence. I feel obligated to get the most out of all the energy and earthly resources that went into building this machine in the 1st place. This iMac will probably be the last desktop Mac I bought brand new. As it is, it’s also the Mac that went unsupported the fastest of all the macs I’ve owned since I was handed down a Mac 512ke some 35 years ago.
There are satellites out there in the universe built 30 years ago that are still doing their job today. Phftt.
Thanks for your feedback and sharing your experience!
I hear you! I don’t like it either. So it goes.
Backing up several steps in this discussion, I am in a similar position to the original poster: I manage a small NPO that owns CS6, installed on 2013 iMac running HighSierra; their new-ish 2020 Intel iMac on Monterey is now the main machine EXCEPT for the Adobe apps. After lots of digging, it’s my understanding that there’s just no possible way now to re-install CS6 (or earlier CS suites) in a VM on a newer machine (or any machine running Mojave-and-under), because the Adobe server used for authenticating your license was abandoned by Adobe years ago, and without that authentication, the apps won’t reliably run even if they seem to at first. (Adobe likes to phone home every now and then.) If someone here has found a way to make a fresh install of Adobe CS on a machine or VM that can run it (Mojave or below), please, please post it somewhere!
I also have seriously considered Affinity’s suite, and appreciate all the detailed reports on how it compares to Photoshop/Acrobat/Illustrator. At the time I looked at Affinity, I needed back-and-forth interchangeability with a person creating illustrations in Photoshop who used text layers extensively. Affinity Photo will preserve layers per se when exporting to .psd, but text layers are rendered as graphics in the .psd, not as text, which was a dealbreaker for me at the time. Don’t know if that’s still the case…but it’s something to check for before you buy, if you need that feature.
Neil,
My wife is cataloging thousands of family photos, from both sides of our heritage. We did a lot of thinking about how to catalog them, and I have used Adobe LR myself. The problem is, in 100 years, will any of the current software apps even be able to be run? Thus we decided on just Finder, using some description in the file name, along with a TSV list/catalog (mostly maintained in a spreadsheet). One big hurdle was identifying different people all with the same name. So we came up with just birth year, such as Otto1952, vs Otto1960 are two different people.
I’ve used SuperPaint, Canvas, FreeHand, Illustrator (along with various briefing programs) and I had little trouble making the transition. I’ve been using Affinity Designer for about 2 months, and I am not a pro, just casual user. There are plenty of tutorials on their webpage, and have found them pretty quick to reply on their forums.
There are instructions here for generating an offline response code for CS5, 5.5 and 6. No idea if it works.
It might be worth having a look at the venerable Graphic Converter which I’ve just rediscovered after many years. It has some powerful digital asset management features such as the Browser which has extensive metadata tools (for instance ExifTool is built in), convert and modify, powerful batch processing, renaming tools, face recognition, labels and tags, non-destructive editing in Cocooner, basic RAW editing, export of Exif to CSV, cataloging to print or html, etc etc. It’s taken me a few days just to go through the multiple preference options (which fortunately can be exported to a reloadable file)!
I’ve just discovered, for instance, that the Date Created tag displayed for many of my files can sometimes be different to the Exif: Date and time of original data generation tag. It seems the time and date displayed on the file can sometimes reflect the time it was downloaded to the computer rather than the time it was shot. This is easily fixable with GC, either on individual photos or in batch. Now that sunset is no longer showing as being taken at 11 in the morning!
“The problem is, in 100 years, will any of the current software apps even be able to be run?”
Any half-way decent DAM will let you export the metadata data to text files, csv, or something else standard. Some can also create ‘sidecar’ files for each photo, which are text files with all of the metadata and are named the same as the photo and live in the same directory, but with a .xmp extension. They can often be used to import into a different DAM. Since the xmp is text, it can be otherwise manipulated, and there are at east some tools out there for that, including the free command line exiftool (I’m beginning to think that there’s nothing that exiftool can’t do…)
I recently got Illy CS6 working on a 2011 Sierra iMac, as I want to upgrade the drive on my 2015 MBPr. I had tried it about a year ago and couldn’t get it to authenticate, but when I tried it recently it worked. I will still have fonts to move over but I can open my old files still.
Looks like my initial install was April 2022 and second try was the end of November.
I am pretty sure I downloaded the installer from my Adobe account although I’m equally sure I have it saved on a backup drive. I was hoping that would help with the install (it didn’t in April). That is often an issue with Quickbooks.
Diane