Run Adobe Photoshop CS3 on a Case Sensitive Filesystem

My roommate just slaved over his macbook for the past ~7 hours to get Adobe Photoshop CS3 to run on Leopard (with a case sensitive filesystem). Adobe has admitted that their products don’t work in with a case sensitive filesystem but refuse to invest the time required to fix it citing lack of “user benefit provided by case sensitivity” and that they’ve “chosen to invest elsewhere” John Nack. My roommate spent a few hours and was able to get Photoshop running on his Mac after renaming only 65 files.

You can read a full write up of the instructions to get Photoshop working here http://imaginationunbound.blogspot.com/2007/12/adobe-photoshop-cs3-on-mac-os-x-case.html

PhotoshopCS3CaseFixer.shPhotoshopCS3CaseFixer.sh
Modify Photoshop install to work with case sensitive FS.

Update 01/10/2008: Updated the link to the Photoshop fix.
Update 04/25/2009: Hosting PhotoshopCS3CaseFixer.sh on this blog since the original blog is no longer maintained.

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December 11, 2007 | Filed Under Mac OS X 

Comments

7 Responses to “Run Adobe Photoshop CS3 on a Case Sensitive Filesystem”

  1. Johan Smolders on January 10th, 2008 11:40 am

    Hey Rob,

    The blog you reffer to seems to be offline. :( Can you mail me the thigs John changed to get it working. I have the same problem.

    Regards

  2. Rob on January 10th, 2008 5:40 pm

    Thanks Johan! I’ve updated the post to reflect the new URL.

  3. Adobe CS4’s Still Does Not Work On Case Sensitive File Systems | Thinking Digitally on December 9th, 2008 7:25 am

    [...] December, I blogged about the lengths my roommates and I had to go through to get Adobe Photoshop CS3 to install on Leopard formated with a case sensitive filesystem. In the end we got it to work. The problem seemed to just be laziness on Adobe’s part and an [...]

  4. Roberto Cosenza on January 12th, 2009 4:12 pm

    Just a followup on the case sensitive fs and photoshop… http://robcos.com/what-a-mistake-case-sensitive-hfs-on-my-mac-book/

  5. Ranjan Batra on September 30th, 2009 9:30 pm

    Hi. I’m planning to move to Leopard on a PowerPC Mac. As I understand it, Photoshop CS4 will not run on a PowerPC Mac, so I have to use CS3 (which isn’t that easy to get hold of …). But if I do, I gather the installation won’t run unless I go through renaming the filenames.

    Question: is the *.sh file above a script of some kind? Or do I just paste it into the terminal window?

    Also, I have Photoshop 7.0 which doesn’t work on Leopard. Do you think it would with this fix?

  6. Rob Olson on October 1st, 2009 2:46 am

    Ranjan- Photoshop CS3 should run just fine on PowerPC Leopard as long as you do not format the partition’s filesystem to be case sensitive, which is what this post addresses. Non-case sensitive is the default so you should be fine unless you manually changed it when installing Leopard.

    The above sh file is a shell script. It has to be executed from Terminal if you end up needing it.

    This script will not work at all with Photoshop 7.0. Only Photoshop CS3.

  7. fcore on March 25th, 2010 1:44 pm

    Any chance to get this script working on Photoshop CS? V.8.

    Pulling my hair off already!

    Cant tell the files photoshop is missing to rename them.

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