A long standing mystery of mine has just been solved!
*Preface* I’m going to go into detail about this just in case any of you mac-using photographers have suffered the same annoyance.
For a month or so I’ve been trying to figure out why every couple of days Photoshop just freezes, dies and won’t successfully restart. The solution until today was to huff and puff and inevitably restart this beautiful new machine in frustration because Photoshop couldn’t boot past “measuring memory.” Through a random sequence of events today I think I’ve found out what’s up. First I noticed that my main backup hard drive hadn’t done it’s job so I ejected it with the intention of disconnecting and reconnecting it. Nothing ejected. So while waiting for that I went to work on an image. Then Photoshop froze, which I have unfortunately gotten way to used to. I force it to close and then attempt to reopen it because for some reason I always expect (hope) for a different result. Same thing…stuck on “measuring memory.”
Force close again.
Normally I’ll try to reopen it a few times so I don’t have to bother closing everything and restarting. This time though I still needed to deal with the backup hard drive so I disconnected that and randomly tried to restart Photoshop again before my other hand plugged the drive back in. It opened like a switchblade. I didn’t even have to restart. That clue led me to do a little research and apparently there is a bug in the latest MacOS where having a peripheral (even an iphone) plugged into the computer can cause this. It’s not a constant occurance. Like I said, for me it only happens every few days. It is definitely consistent though.
So, if you’re experiencing this too…unplug anything that isn’t your keyboard and mouse, maybe it’ll work for you too.
See you tomorrow,
D