If you bought the Photoshop Elements Editor from the Mac App Store and you’ve tried to use it in the past couple of days, you’ve discovered that it’s not working. Instead you see something like this:

Before this, you may get a weird message that you originally downloaded PSE on another computer and you need to sign in to authorize it on this one, even though you know it’s not true.

It’s not anything you did, nor is it the result of some update to El Capitan (10.11). Everyone is having this problem with all the App Store versions on all versions of OS X, and for now there isn’t really a solution.

Evidently there was a problem with expired security certificates that made practically everything from the App Store (not just PSE) stop working the other day, but it’s supposedly fixed now. However, I can confirm that the fixes you will find posted all over the Internet, like here, for example, don’t work for PSE at all, at least not for anyone I know who’s tried them:

http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/12/all-mac-store-apps-stopped-working-due-to-expired-security-certificate/#.c2lpn5:QtJ1

First of all, unless you have PSE 13 (the latest App Store version), don’t uninstall PSE unless you have a backup copy someplace. When Adobe releases a new version of PSE for the App Store, the older one becomes unavailable for download in the future.  EDIT I see they’ve changed this; in the past I could not download older versions again, but now the App Store does make the old versions available, a great improvement.)

(You should always keep a backup copy of the App Store versions; normally you can reinstall them by simply dropping the PSE folder into the Applications folder on another Mac. Note that this only applies to the App Store version, not at all in any way to the regular download or disc versions of PSE.) Adobe does offer downloads of older versions on their website, but those all require a serial number for installation, which you don’t have, since your Apple ID takes the place of a serial number for the App Store, so that doesn’t help you, either.

It appears that most App Store apps are fixed, although Elements is still majorly broken. For whatever it’s worth, I have one other App Store application (a silly game that is quite old) that also remains broken, so it’s not totally just an Adobe problem.

Right now all I can say is that Adobe is investigating this, but so far there is no fix for it.  When they get it figured out, I’ll post the solution for you.

If you bought PSE elsewhere, either as a download or on disc, it should be working normally, and any problems you might have aren’t related to this particular issue.

If you use Photoshop Elements for Windows and you’ve applied the update to PSE 13.1, you probably noticed that you have trouble scrolling in the organizer since the update. Adobe has finally released a fix for that, which you can download here:

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop-elements/kb/photoshop-elements-13-1-hotfix.html

(If you don’t use the Organizer, or if you have a Mac, there’s no need for this.)

If you’re using Photoshop Elements 13 and you’ve had the recent problem with getting locked out of Facebook when uploading a new Cover Photo made with the PSE feature, Adobe has corrected the problem and it should be fine now. Try it again and see.

I’m pleased to report that the PSE 12.1 update seems to have taken care of most of the performance issues with the Photoshop Elements 12 Auto Analyzer, at least on Macs. Since the update the auto analyzer does pop up again when you restart or log out and then back in to your account, but it only runs briefly and then disappears from Activity Monitor if the PSE Organizer isn’t running. More importantly, it doesn’t seem to be gobbling up resources even when it does run. I’ve kept it going for two days now and the most ram it ever used was about 46MB of real memory, less than, say, Dropbox uses when it’s idle. With the Organizer closed, it only got up to about 20 MB before it stopped.

So I would definitely say that while I don’t think Adobe specifically addressed this problem as part of the 12.1 update, something about the update does make a huge difference in performance. In its idle state, the whole Organizer now uses less memory than OS X Mail does when it’s not fetching or sending, so I would strongly encourage everyone to download the update and just forget about disabling the auto analyzer other than by the checkboxes in the Organizer preferences>Media Analysis.. That still doesn’t stop it completely, but it’s not running constantly the way it did before.

(For Windows, I never had the catalog/version set problem that some people had with converted catalogs, so no way to test there. If you use Windows and the update helped, I’d like to hear about it–you can contact me via the link at the upper right of this page.)

EDIT 3-15-14: I’m told by several people that the update does fix the version set problem in Windows, so that’s another good reason to go for it.

Once again, if you did rename the auto analyzer or put a space in its name, be sure to remove the space or rename it back before running the update, or it will fail. In Windows the update may run, but it may be overlooking anything to do with Auto Analyzer.

On either platform, if the update still fails, if you’ve installed the Adobe TWAIN plugin, put it back into Optional Plugins and try again. If the update succeeds, you can reinstall it.

If you’ve never installed TWAIN and never renamed the auto analyzer, or if the update still fails after fixing both of those, just uninstall/reinstall and it should work.