InDesign, Photoshop or Illustrator won't open after macOS Tahoe?

Read the crash log

Before changing anything, find out how the app is dying. macOS wrote it down. Open Console (⌘ Space, type Console, Return), pick Crash Reports, and find your app. Or in Terminal:

% ls -lt ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/ | head

Crash reports, newest first. If the app hangs rather than crashes, there may be no report at all — that's its own clue.

The line that matters is the termination reason. On the iMac above, InDesign 2026 reported EXC_CRASH (SIGTERM).

SIGTERM is a request to quit, sent from outside the app. The app didn't fall over — something ended it. Two more lines in the same report say which: Termination Reason names who sent it, and the timestamps show how long the app had been running. Ended a minute or two into a launch that never finished is macOS giving up on it.

Low memory and a full disk also end apps, but they name themselves in the Termination Reason and they affect the whole Mac — not one app that launched fine yesterday.

NoahNoah leads with this read. On that machine it named the launch timeout in the first pass, before touching a file.

Stale cache

The app bounces in the Dock, maybe shows a splash screen, then stops. It worked the day before the upgrade.

A cache is scratch work — thumbnails, indexes, half-finished lookups the app keeps so it doesn't redo them. It's meant to be thrown away. After an OS upgrade some of it describes a Mac that no longer exists, and the app can stall reading it.

One exception, and it's InDesign's: InDesign keeps auto-recovery data for unsaved documents inside its cache folder, at ~/Library/Caches/Adobe InDesign/Version x.0/InDesign Recovery. If it crashed with unsaved work, that folder is how you get it back.

Fixif you have unrecovered work, launch InDesign once and let it offer the recovery. Then quit the app and look at what's there:

% ls ~/Library/Caches | grep -i adobe

Adobe's cache folders. Run this with the app quit.

Fixdrag the app's cache folder to the Trash — don't delete it — and launch the app. On that iMac, InDesign's cache was 4.3 MB, and clearing it got the app open.

Two days later it broke again. A cache clear that works and then stops working means the cache wasn't the cause — something was rewriting bad scratch data on every launch.

Stale preferences

The app hangs on launch and never opens. Often there's no crash report at all — it hangs before it can write one.

Preferences are your settings — window layouts, tool defaults, recent files. They live in ~/Library/Preferences as a folder plus a .plist file. Unlike a cache, the app trusts them completely. A preferences file written before the upgrade can describe fonts, displays or paths that Tahoe handles differently, and the app sits waiting on it until macOS ends it.

These were the files on that machine. The exact names move between versions, so look before you touch anything:

• InDesign 2026 — ~/Library/Preferences/Adobe InDesign/Version 21.0 and com.adobe.InDesign.plist
• Photoshop 2026 — ~/Library/Preferences/Adobe Photoshop 2026 Settings and com.adobe.Photoshop.plist
• Illustrator 30 — ~/Library/Preferences/Adobe Illustrator 30 Settings and com.adobe.illustrator.plist

The version in the folder name is the app's internal number, not its year: InDesign 2026 keeps its settings in Version 21.0, Illustrator 2026 in Illustrator 30 Settings.

% ls ~/Library/Preferences | grep -i indesign

The exact names on your Mac. Swap “indesign” for photoshop or illustrator.

Now the important part: rename, don't delete. Adding .bak makes the app unable to find the file, so it writes a fresh one — and leaves your old settings there if you want them back. Quit the app, then:

% cd ~/Library/Preferences

Everything below runs from inside this folder.

% mv -n com.adobe.InDesign.plist com.adobe.InDesign.plist.bak

Renames the file; nothing is deleted. The -n refuses rather than overwriting if a .bak from an earlier attempt is already there — if the file hasn't moved afterwards, that's what happened. To undo, run it with the two names swapped.

Fixrename both the folder and the .plist, then launch the app. It rebuilds its settings from defaults. You'll redo workspace and preference tweaks — that's the whole cost.

NoahNoah applies this fix by renaming to .noah_bak rather than deleting: a settings file you can put back is a fix you can undo.

Third-party plugins

The app opens after a preferences reset, then hangs again — or hangs only on a particular document.

Adobe apps load plugins during launch, before the window appears. A plugin compiled for the previous macOS can sit there failing to load, and macOS ends the whole app for taking too long. Anything you installed yourself counts: font managers, colour tools, stock-asset panels, tablet drivers.

% ls "/Applications/Adobe InDesign 2026/Plug-Ins/"

Adobe's own plugins live here too — you're looking for names you recognise as things you added.

Fixdrag any non-Adobe plugin to the Desktop and launch the app. If it opens, put them back one at a time to find the culprit.

On that iMac every plugin was stock Adobe. That fixed nothing, but it removed the last cause that was on the Mac.

The app isn't ready for Tahoe

It opens now, but hangs while you work — after cache, preferences and plugins have all been cleared.

Sometimes the version of the app you have and the version of macOS you have don't get along, and nothing on your side of the machine will change that.

That's where the InDesign story on that iMac ended. The cache clear got it open. The preferences reset got it open and held. It still hung during use, with no third-party plugins, no memory pressure and no swap — a genuine incompatibility between InDesign 2026 v21.4.0.74 and macOS 26, needing a patch from Adobe. Photoshop and Illustrator, same machine, same day, needed only the preferences reset and were fine.

Fixopen Creative Cloud → Updates and install anything offered. Reinstalling the same version does nothing — Creative Cloud won't install two copies of one version, and the copy you get back is byte-for-byte the one you had.

If there's no update yet, that's a real answer, and it's worth having early: work around it today rather than spend the day on a reinstall that was never going to work.

Don't uninstall first

Uninstalling costs an hour of a working day and puts your presets, workspaces and plugin licences in play. And Adobe's uninstaller asks whether to keep or remove your preferences. Keeping them looks like the safe answer, so most people do — and if stale preferences were the cause, you land back exactly where you started.

The Creative Cloud Cleaner Tool is a real Adobe utility for a genuinely damaged installation. That case is rare, and it's the last thing to try. Renaming one file takes ten seconds and tells you the answer.

NoahThis is why Noah renames instead of deleting. Every change is shown before it runs, you approve it, and the old file is still on disk under a new name.