Tahoe and Photoshop Elements

TidBITS Talk
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Apologies if I’ve missed a discussion or article on this. I’ve just upgraded to Tahoe, and my version of Photoshop Elements no longer works. Fair enough, it’s quite old (2020), but looking online it seems like some people are also having problems in Tahoe with the latest version of Photoshop Elements. I have two questions – first, does anyone have experience (good or bad) of using Photoshop Elements with Tahoe that they can share, and second, if it is likely to be problematic, what alternatives can people recommend? I don’t use Elements so much for photo editing these days as the tools in Photos are good enough for my needs, but it is really useful for adding annotations to figures etc for lectures and publications so having layers is important.

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So many options… all with layers. A few below…

Affinity, now free, is quite a bit more advanced than PS Elements. Recommended though, I’ve moved my students onto it.

Pixelmator Pro is part of the Creator Studio offering from Apple, a subscription offering. A lovely tool to use, easy to pick up, but very capable.

There’s Acorn, very good too, great for quick edits.

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Thanks Tommy. Pixelmator Pro was going to be my first port of call, but I’ve downloaded Affinity and will give that a try first.

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I have no experience running PE 2020 on Tahoe, so I have no comments to offer there.

I concur with @tommy’s suggestions.

Since it sounds like a simple tool that supports layers is your key requirement, I suggest giving Acorn’s 14-day free trial a look.

Acorn feels slightly retro to me, which means that it doesn’t get in your way with too many offers to fix things or assist you—it just presents a clean, accessible set of tools, ready for use. Just open a file, add a layer, and do what you need to do.

Also, the license is inexpensive and perpetual, and, at least for me, the developer was responsive the one time I had a question.

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I agree Gus Mueller is a terrific developer, Acorn has steadily added features.

These things are so personal in terms of what ‘fits’ each user, it’s a good idea to try them all. Affinity is the most full featured, and free so good to have in the mix, I wouldn’t let that stop me if I was happier in Pixelmator Pro from going that route, it has a great Lightroom style palette of core photo adjustments that keeps me coming back. Acorn, lightweight and speedy, with a great set of web focussed outputs that make it what I turn to when updating my site.

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IIRC Elements included a photo management feature, but if you just need annotations and layers there are a lot of options, including:

Graphic Converter

GIMP

I’m satisfied with both, along with Acorn mentioned above.

If layers are not essential, and you just need to add text, shapes etc to an image the Preview in MacOS itself might be enough.

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In what way is it no longer working. Not launching, or something more subtle?

I’m currently running PS Elements 2021 on macOS 15 (haven’t yet upgraded to 26). It runs via Rosetta, including support for the SilverFast scanner plugin. My only issues so far have been:

  • It frequently asks me to upgrade, even though I’m using the latest version of 2021. If I ignore the request, all is fine. If I tell it to upgrade, the upgrade never actually happens - it tries, eventually times out, leaving nothing changed.
  • When I use the SilverFast scanner plugin (which works), SilverFast remains running for a few minutes after my scan completes. If I quit Elements or try another scan before it goes away on its own, Elements crashes. But since I usually want to do something with what I just scanned, it is rarely a problem.

I don’t plan on upgrading Elements until after Rosetta 2 goes away. But Adobe doesn’t have any version that works on macOS 26, it may force me to reevaluate what I’m doing.

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Thanks both - I’ll also try Acorn.

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So, PS Elements opens, but when I attempt to launch the photo editor part it comes up with the unhelpful error message ‘Adobe Photoshop cannot run on this computer because the minimum system requirement is Mac OS X version’. PS Elements 2020 ran fine on Sequoia

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Thanks David - I have Graphic Converter and have found it helpful in some circumstances, but perhaps I need to spend more time with it to get the most out of it. It’s good to know there are lots of possible tools out there. All I need now is the time to play with them all!

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Sounds like this error that lots of people on Adobe’s forums are reporting:

Given the nature of the error message (note that it doesn’t print an actual version number), I think the software got tripped up by the version number’s jump from 15 to 26. Much like how other software got tripped up when macOS moved from 10.15 to 11 and when Windows moved from 8 to 10. Lazy/stupid algorithms for comparing version numbers resulting in the app thinking it’s running on an OS much older than reality.

Unfortunately, being an old version that’s no longer supported, I’m sure they won’t be releasing any updates.

What are the problems you’re reading about the latest version of Elements? According to Adobe, the only problem is:

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There were some reports that the new version wasn’t working and some that it was OK, though I didn’t find anything very detailed. That’s why I turned to the community for help.

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