Stop Adobe Background Processes From Automatically Launching

If you have Adobe Creative Cloud installed then every time you start your Mac the Creative Cloud app and a number of big background processes will start automatically. If you don't use Adobe apps every day, you may want to change this so none of it starts until you use your first Adobe app.

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Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to stop Adobe Background Tasks from automatically launching every time you restart your Mac.
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Now I love Adobe and it has been a big part of my career, Adobe and Macromedia before that, but what can be really annoying about Adobe Creative Cloud is it has so many background apps running on your Mac. If you look in Activity Monitor you'll see all of them going. This would be true even if you're not using any Adobe Apps. In fact, even if you haven't launched any Adobe apps in awhile. I fell into this category. I don't use Adobe Apps that often. I need them for certain things but I could go days without using any of these apps. But all these background tasks are still going to be there and running. 
Now it's easy to have the Creative Cloud App not launch when you login or restart your Mac. It is just a setting there in Creative Cloud. You just turn that Off and now the app no longer launches. But that doesn't stop all these background tasks from automatically launching when you start your Mac. Now you need these to be running in order to use the apps. So if you're a frequent user of, say, PhotoShop, then none of this really matters. These probably should be running right from the get go because you're going to be in PhotoShop sooner or later and you're going to use PhotoShop a lot so might as well have them going. But if you're like me and rarely use the apps, only once every few days or so, then you don't want these necessarily running every time you boot your Mac up. 
Now typically I like to do videos on how to do things the right way. The right place to go to change the Settings to do things as it is supposed to work. In this case there is no right way because these things are going to launch because you have Adobe Creative Cloud installed and there's no way to tell them not to launch. But I still don't want them to launch! So I have done basically a hack. I've gone in and I prevented these from launching. It turns out this hack works pretty well because if you do then go ahead and launch Creative Cloud or you launch, say, PhotoShop they all launch automatically and everything works fine. At least so far. I have been doing this for years. 
So the trick is to go into Main Library folder. That's the Library Folder at the very top level of your drive. Not your User Library folder. Look there for a Launch Agents and Launch Demons. In these folders you're going to find things that are named with Adobe in the title. I simply go through and Delete all of these. Now what these are is they are not apps or anything in themselves. They are just links to apps. They are little descriptions of this app needs to be running when you start your Mac. By removing them from there they won't launch. So when you start your Mac up it's like starting it up if you don't have Creative Cloud installed. If you look then in Activity Monitor you won't see any of them there. However, if you do something like say launch PhotoShop they all automatically launch. PhotoShop is smart enough to say, hey I need these things, and trigger them all to launch.
There are some downsides though to doing this. One is that things won't automatically update. So say if you don't use any Creative Cloud apps the whole day and none of this was running then you might miss out on some updates until you then launch the apps and then you get hit with the updates. That could be inconvenient but again we're talking about if you're not using the apps all the time anyway. The other downside is  that once you do launch an app, like Creative Cloud or PhotoShop or Illustrator, or whatever, then these are all going to be running. It's not easy to shut them down. You can go in and kill the processes in Activity Monitor but I don't like that. It's a very inelegant way to handle it. However, for me I really like to not have these run at all until I need them. 
So in the long run this won't really help you because as soon as you use an Adobe App all these will be running. But at least from the latest time you restarted your Mac up until the first time you need to use one of these apps these background processes won't be running. So it is marginally useful. But I get asked about this enough and I personally find a big benefit from doing this so I thought I would share it with everyone. I'm also frustrated by the fact that so many sites out there don't tell you about this but instead will tell you to turn off the main Creative Cloud App and ignore all these background apps. 
So I hope you found this tip useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 5 Responses to “Stop Adobe Background Processes From Automatically Launching”

Nan Holcomb

2 months ago

Thank you! I use Adobe maybe twice a month.

Ron Housley

Once I deleted those Adobe files running in the background, my Mac lost its sluggishness and ran fast as it did when it was brand new! Those Adobe files were gumming up the works. Thanks!

Bob Earp

1 month ago

Fantastic tip Gary, many thanks. Now, assuming that I understood you correctly, these Agents and Daemons will automatically get reloaded when either you run an Adobe app (or CreativeCloud), or you reload your Mac, yes ?
If that's correct is there a way that an Automator script can be run ? Never done that !!
Kind regards, Bob...

Gary Rosenzweig

Bob: The running processes will yes. But the LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons (what make them launch on boot) will not. Doing an Automator script to kill them would be difficult and require a lot of effort to get it right. Plus, it may not be a good idea to "kill" these processes while they are running. If you are running Adobe apps that often anyway then you should probably let these processes run.

Thanks Gary. Like a lot of people I've considered moving away from most Adobe apps as I don't use them much at all, it's really only Acrobat that I rely on for some document creation/management and I've yet to find a decent replacement.
I've just remembered that I had Acrobat as the default app for reading .pdf files and changed that to Preview so (hopefully) I will rarely open an Adobe app in the future.

Stop Adobe Background Processes From Automatically Launching

Comments: 5 Responses to “Stop Adobe Background Processes From Automatically Launching”

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